Author: Starthief

GreenPal might not be my pal

For a few years, we had our yard mowed by Big T, who we hired through GreenPal. He did a pretty decent job, was almost always right on time (or within one day) unless weather was an issue, and let us know when he couldn’t make it. He did raise his prices a little over the course of several years but was still not what I’d call expensive.

Last year, he contacted me and said he was trying to get off of GreenPal because of their fee increases and some other issues, but he could keep cutting our grass at the same price. And I said yes. But without that service he wasn’t as well organized; sometimes he’d mow and not text me (which was my prompt to pay) and a couple of times he managed to lose us in the schedule entirely.

At the start of this mowing season I looked for other bids. I went with All Star Solutions in sort-of-nearby-ish-but-not-really Collinsville. He was cheap and seemed reliable and had good reviews; he had worked for another lawn company and was branching out on his own.

Well. He didn’t mow as well as Big T, but… good enough, I thought. Then a couple of times he had to reschedule, and I thought, well, growing pains of a new business, I’ll keep giving him a chance. And it started happening more — he’d reschedule on GreenPal without contacting me. He apologized and said he was hiring some extra help to make things go faster. But then it happened again, repeatedly. Once it was more than four weeks between mowings, instead of two. Then he had some equipment problems and more delays. Then when we got the new retaining wall, my instructions about what to mow and what to leave alone confused him. Then he had vehicle trouble. Then he injured himself. And now he’s cancelled with “I don’t have the equipment for the job” given as the reason, again four weeks after the last time he mowed here. GreenPal automatically started a new bid search and there’s one early hit but I’m not sure about those ratings, so I’m hoping for other options.

Looking at All Star’s profile on GreenPal — which I had to use a separate browser for because my logged-in one refuses to show me anything but the “Hire one of your bids now!” page, including any way to log out — he has a 5/5 star rating and a 92% reliability score — because instead of missing a scheduled mowing he’s always just reschedule it in their system! They don’t show how many times he’s done that to people. And the rating system always made me feel reluctant to give less than 5 stars even for a half-assed job.

My parents use another service, which I think they may have found through GreenPal, but they also have a website where you can hire them directly. We’ll see how the bid thing goes.

a rosy jumble

St. Louis hasn’t gotten unhealthy amounts of smoke from the Canadian wildfires as badly as some other areas have, but we had our turn at it several days ago. That was also right before when we were doing our festival stuff and there was probably too much incense. (We do use the Japanese stuff which is relatively clean and produces less smoke, but… particulates anyway.) We thought this was why my spouse came down with chest congestion.

But then about a week later, I did too. Really harsh cough, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even work from home on day one. Day two I was functional but semi-miserable. Day three, the coughing eased way off (but my nose ran much more) and I was merely run down. Day four, almost okay (and I recorded something). Today, I feel… almost good? I’m really too used to these things lingering and having bronchospasm for weeks (coughing triggered by activity or change in temperature).

On a side note. Why do so many things contain menthol? I really dislike the stuff, but it can be hard to avoid. When I put it on my skin (in the form of shaving cream, or aftershave or whatever) it feels hot more than it feels cool, like maybe I am mildly allergic to it. In cough drops, it tastes nasty and doesn’t seem to provide any actual relief. And apparently it’s in the nasal spray I bought too. (Which was effective, but… blech).

The thing I mentioned which I recorded? Inspired by someone asking me for my takes on some different modules. None of them looked like my cup of tea, but I explained why and what I use instead. That got me patching some stuff up, driven by a Marbles sequence…

…which I wanted to cut out and turn into a drone some of the time. I realized that I had nothing in the rack that is suitable for switching a pitch sequence. When I got the Jumbler, I assumed it could do my switching and I set my Doepfer A-150 aside. But Jumbler doesn’t maintain 1.0x gain from input to output, so it strangled my nicely tuned pitch sequence. Okay fine, I’ll just feed it through a VCA that I can gate with a button… no, that’s not 1.0x either, though maybe if I amplified the voltage from the gate the exact right amount… what a hassle. I didn’t even try routing this through Bitwig, because that also meant tweaking ranges so I get out what I put in (and also, coping with latency). I wound up just plugging and unplugging the patch cable by hand to “gate” the pitch sequence, and frowning the whole time.

I was already thinking that Jumbler wasn’t, in my actual usage, living up to the promise I saw in it at its release. You can do a lot with it, but these are the bummers, as I see them:

  • you can’t continuously rotate in the same direction, but run into limits. Input 1 doesn’t crossfade to input 6 and vice versa.
  • it’s basically impossible to set up a circular, glitch-free rotation using a ramp wave in the Rotate CV input. One of the things I dream of doing in Eurorack is “orbital panning” or 2D rotation — given two inputs X and Y, rotate them in 2D about a central point represented by 0V, 0V. There’s a VCV Rack module that does this quite nicely, and it’s a pretty simple patch in Bitwig Grid.
  • the aforementioned loss of signal level means it doesn’t preserve pitch CV. Granted, I could still use it with 0-Ctrl or Zorlon Cannon etc. where I tune unquantized values by ear… but only if I know I’m going to want to switch it before setting it up.
  • at the same time, the gain isn’t lowered enough when mixing several audio signals, so you get clipping and have to individually attenuate all of the inputs.

The amazing thing about Jumbler is that it has a whopping 36 VCAs — one to route each input to each output. It’s kind of incredible that it’s not stupefyingly expensive. But the limitations are a drag, and like I said… I just have not been using it as much as I had hoped I would.

One thing I’m looking at as an alternative is Jolin Rosa. It’s a whole different kettle of fish though: it does have the continuous rotation that Jumbler lacks, but it doesn’t actually rotate one input to another output. Rather, it has a 4-1 “scan” mode, a 1-4 “pass” mode, and a 4-4 “wave” mode where each VCA is independent but there’s a sort of rolling opening and closing of them. This has required some tricky thought where I’ve tried to figure out what this means for various patch ideas.

I think, after more contemplation than it should require, Rosa can’t do stereo crosspanning. This is a fairly simple operation but it confuses people. So here’s my lovely 5-minute MS Paint diagram:

Each rectangle represents a VCA, and the red lines the direction of influence that the CV has over it. When panning, as the L channel decreases the R channel increases. But crosspanning requires 4 VCAs, two of which open together and two of which open oppositely from the first two.

Rosa’s 4 VCAs do something more like this:

So I guess I have to ask myself, what exactly am I looking for here? And I’m not sure I am, I just got caught up in the possibilities. If I want to crosspan in the rack, I should probably just look for that (or get a Cold Mac again) — but I’m not sure this is necessary. As fun as Rosa might be, I should be able to do most of that with Multimod and the Doepfer Octal VCA.

A funny thing though — while I was researching this, I searched YouTube for “Jolin Rosa.” It pointed me to a video by Taiwanese pop star Jolin Tsai, called “Womxnly.” Maybe because the song lyrics mention roses? I’m not exactly into C-pop (or J-pop, K-pop, or… pop) but it’s pretty catchy and sweet (even if I’m not big on the unpronounceable x replacing vowels thing). It’s a song for Yeh Yung-chih, a gender-nonconforming student who was bullied and beaten to death in 2000. But Taiwan being more progressive than most of Asia in terms of LGBTQ rights, that incident led to some actual changes. (Still not perfect, but ahead of the US even before this year’s fascism got started.)

looking down

Basement waterproofing work yesterday apparently went fast and easy, and they got a little further along on the first day than they expected. We’re still going to have sloped edges around the outside, due to the footers for the wall not being as deep as they should have, but that’s not a big issue.

Under these black covers are the drain tiles and gravel. Aside from a better design of drain tile, they drilled new weep holes in the walls, and there’s now a proper pipe going into the sump pump instead of just holes in the side of the sump pit.

And outside, the sump pump outflow and two of the downspouts are getting routed into a 4″ pipe that will run down the hill right beside our new retaining wall, carrying water away. Those two downspouts had, previously, uselessly just dumped water between the house and the sidewalk, and the sump pump outflow had a short trench with a corrugated plastic pipe that would just pool water up until it didn’t have anywhere to go. (We didn’t have an issue with the sump pit overflowing — but it was also handling a lot less water than it should have been.)

They’re here now, doing the basement/garage concrete, finishing the trench and pipe, and weather permitting, they’ll pour concrete back in where they’ve cut out the sidewalk. They’ll also dump excess dirt right next to the house so it’s not quite as low there.

Maneco Labs, which I knew of from Eurorack stuff, has a fairly new pedal out in collaboration with Pedal Partners: Mesmeriser, a reverb designed for shoegaze by some surprisingly young shoegaze fanatics. Called that because of the tendency of guitarists to stare down at massive pedalboards full of effects taken to extremes, this is a genre that mostly lived and died in the 90s, with Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. But it has had an ongoing if not especially large following, continued influence and cousin genres. It is related to dreampop, ethereal wave, darkwave, drone, ambient, and noise.

My own opinion on shoegaze is a bit divided. Aside from the obvious drone, I like the more ethereal side — generally floaty, woozy, dazzled, with (largely unintelligible) female vocals or none at all, but also sometimes quite heavy and busy in its saturated, lo-fi, overbaked sound. Contrast between stereotypical beauty/lightness and stereotypical ugliness/heaviness, with all of it ultimately serving beauty and breaking expectations. In this area, my top pick is Lovesliescrushing. (I do quite like some stuff on the more dreampop end of things, particularly Cocteau Twins.) There’s plenty of shoegaze where I’d like it far more if it were instrumental, and/or without the drums.

During the course of Suspension I came to realize I was feeling a bit of that influence. I think it’s because of the relatively open chords and playing with tons of reverb, the dreamy dizzy modulation of Slöer. It hit a bit more when I recorded “Tug” with the Miezo, with chords emerging from Multimod sounding a little like a shoegazer’s strumming. And of course, the whole contrast thing runs right alongside my own “ambient but messy” aesthetics.

Anyway, that pedal. On a thread about stereo delays for synths, there was some talk both of Slöer and Dark Star… and someone brought up Mesmeriser. I watched the video, and loved the sound and decided I had to have it. The first drop sold out super fast, and then they very quickly opened up orders for a second one that’ll go out at the end of the month, and I’m in on that.

The shoegazer’s pedalboard tends to be very much like a modular synth except for guitar, and they too are gear connoisseurs and experimenters. So it’s kind of wild that this bunch has come up with a design where a single pedal with five knobs is more than sufficient for the complete sound (even if nothing is enough to quench the thirst for experimentation, or the satisfaction in taking some old cheap effect and turning it to a new never-imagined purpose).

Between these thoughts and these effects, I may be diverted from my first thought about the next album project after all. I might be leaning into this more shoegazey thing. I want to try the Miezo, and the lap steel and even the kalimba and tongue drums, with Dark Star and with Mesmeriser. So I’m not necessarily committing one way or another yet.

I’m still reading the Mabinogion Tetralogy, but am now on the fourth branch. Wherein Arawn, Lord of the Dead, sends some exciting new technology to Pryderi, the (step)son of the guy who saved his bacon in the first branch: pigs. That’s right, people have been boar hunting for centuries but it took a god to domesticate them. This newfangled invention is so disruptive that a war is started over it.

Also in the book, apparently there are pharaohs in Egypt at this time, which would be… oops, probably around the 11th-12th century AD. This is roughly the equivalent degree of anachronism to giving William the Conqueror an iPhone. This bit came out in yet another Old Tribes/New Tribes thing, only this time it’s about how maybe incest is a good idea sometimes.

I’ve changed my mind about wanting to read a translation next for comparison, I’m going to just be done with this and move on. Next up will be High Vaultage, a novel set in the world of Victoriocity — a steampunk detective comedy podcast that we thoroughly enjoyed. And then some of those books from that Indie Enby Bundle.

19/19

I rearranged the track order on the album a little, which makes it work better, and recorded one final, fairly short track. Recording phase is officially done. The album doesn’t need to be two hours long; I don’t want it to get to the point where I’m either rehashing ideas, or desperately looking for something that sounds different while still sticking to the theme. It’s good where it is.

Time for mastering, art, write-up and release…

One thing about a lot of ambient electronic music, and especially drone music by its very nature, is that there isn’t that “space between the notes” that Debussy famously wrote of. Moments of silence, negative space, or ma as it’s called in taiko. Rests, breaks in action, time to breathe. Some drone music does breathe, but either it is always at rest or it never rests… hmm. This is a thing I want to explore, because there is so very little of it in my music.

(I want to be clear: I don’t think that negative space is necessary in this type of music, and the lack of it can even be a defining, intentional factor. Caterina Barbieri has said there’s a Hindu idea of drones being eternal and outside of time, it’s just that we only hear them during a fraction of our own brief lives. But, I don’t consider my music strictly drone anyway, and this is a compositional variable I can play with.)

On 2021’s Pulse Code, I have a steady 49 (or 98) BPM straight beat carrying through the entire album (as long as seamless playback works for you instead of gaps being inserted). The tempo doubles or halves, space opens or closes, echoes come and go, and timbres change so the album can tell its story. I am thinking that on the next one I might do something similar to that, but with each track having its own rhythmic pattern. I contemplated also trying to make the order of tracks randomizable, but… nah 🙂

Kitchen plumbing was finally a success. I am not a plumber by any means, and I was wrong about the leak in the bathroom, but I was 100% right about the problem here: the shutoff valve under the sink was clogged. It was basically growing a calcium carbonate rock the full width of the pipe and at least an inch long. Not the first time we’ve had sedimentary trouble. We live on limestone, and the waters of the Missouri and Meramec rivers are perfectly capable of growing stalactites and stalagmites in caves. I’m not sure why two local plumbers were reluctant to believe the same was happening in our pipes. We’ve had sedimentary trouble before, with the crappy plastic valves of the fridge icemaker and with gravel building up in the aerators of our faucets.

We could benefit from a water softener or some kind of descaler, but I am looking into the options. This is lower priority than fixing the dangerous deck, or the bottom of the chimney. Prices range from cheap (but possibly ineffective) to ludicrous (and high-maintenance and environmentally not great). The best bet may be a water conditioner with TAC, but… like I said, still researching.

Di Wep Ronpet Nofret

(that’s “Happy New Year”, or more literally, “beautiful Opening of the Year”) Minds have been blown, hearts have been filled, the Sun has been greeted, evil has been ritually smashed and burned, goodies have been consumed, and now it’s time to just chill for a while.

Plumbing Monday was a big fail. The guy said that the problem with the hot water in our kitchen sink was the cartridge in the faucet, which was admittedly a Black Friday discount thing on Amazon from a Chinese brand with a goofy name, so it seemed plausible that it might fail after only two years (and also, we have hard water and things get full of sediment). After he tried to clean the cartridge out and put it back, it leaked… so we couldn’t use it for cold water either. He said we just needed to replace the whole thing (he recommended Moen, with Delta as a second choice and Kohler third). He didn’t charge us, since diagnostic fees are covered by our membership (same company does HVAC and plumbing).

We ran out to Home Despot and picked up a $200 Moen faucet we liked, and I popped it in — relatively easy if awkward — and no, we still have no hot water pressure. So it wasn’t the cartridge. (And honestly, from our first impression the Moen doesn’t really feel or look or have better features than the old one… but they do have a lifetime guarantee on the cartridge. Which again, wasn’t what had failed until the guy tried to clean it.) Next plumber appointment to try again is tomorrow afternoon.

Also the basement repair also got pushed to Monday/Tuesday instead of Friday/Monday.

Also, the deck got way worse — perhaps another joist has given way, because there are a couple more boards that flex and bounce alarmingly. Our little dog is afraid of it again, and this time he’s not wrong… except he weighs about 5% of what we do while having twice as many legs.

Friday I said I hadn’t been working on my album lately? In the 4 days since then I’ve recorded 5 more tracks… so far. There’s time for a sixth. 😉 6 more tracks. Album length is at 70 73 minutes now and I think I will keep going a bit more. Probably one more short track, a very pure sus4 chord without much screwing around, to close it out right.

OBNE Dark Star arrived. A couple of days later, the cables I needed did too. Dark Star and Slöer are both Spin FV-1 based, relatively lo-fi reverbs that lean hard into ambient space. (FV-1 isn’t a super powerful processor, and doing things in stereo means it’s got half as much capacity for fancy DSP…)

But within those parameters, they couldn’t be more different. Where Slöer runs toward a cleaner, smoother and more blended (if also woozy and dreamy) sound, Dark Star embraces the dirt. The pitch-shifting is lo-fi granular stuff with noticeable rhythmic pulses and bent timbres, there’s a knob that’s sample rate reduction in one direction and overdrive in the other, a knob for (not at all subtle) lowpass/highpass filtering, and the feedback will go well into infinity. Slöer has a tendency to sound pretty similar across its whole range, pretty much one giant sweet spots unless you happen to go too far with modulation (which is easy enough). Dark Star I feel is a little more of a specialist, is less willing to be subtle, and requires some dialing in. But it can be rewarding.

Right now I have a single effects loop, a pair of stereo outputs on the interface running through Dark Star and then Slöer and then back. If I want to route something to it, I do that in the DAW. This is convenient in general, but I think reversing the order might be beneficial, so I can take Slöer’s opium-den hazy reverb and then distort/crush/disrupt it.

In the Mabiongion tetralogy, I do think the story of Branwen is more engaging that Pwyll’s story. It’s got the troublemaking half-brother offended he wasn’t asked permission when his sister married (the subject of a few later murder ballads); a princess teaching a bird to speak to call for her own rescue (imitated by Tolkien’s Gandalf); a giant of a king who lies his own body down in a river to be a bridge for his troops; the Cauldron of Rebirth (yes, the one from the Disney movie); and is related to the raid on Annwn (the underworld) in Taliesin’s poems.

the gap

House stuff: gutters are cleaned and that one minor elbow repaired with no extra charge (because it was like 12 seconds of work I’m sure) and, thankfully and surprisingly, no need for additional repairs. It all went smooth and fast for once.

In the kitchen, removing the recirculation pump and connecting the hot water direct to the sink didn’t fix the pressure. So we have a plumber scheduled for Monday afternoon. We needed one to mark our “private” (for some reason) water and sewer lines to the water main anyway. The water meter that’s inside our house isn’t ours, but any pipes between it and the main are? Okay whatever.

Music stuff: haven’t recorded anything else, have been busy with other concerns. I am not sure how long I am going to continue working on the current project, extending its length thanks to just how easy it is to come up with neat stuff for it. I do have another idea though… negative space, or ma as the taiko director said. This is something that often gets neglected with ambient and especially drone music.

I did buy a bunch of albums for Bandcamp Friday though. A little premature to do “reviews” for some of these when I haven’t listened to them all in full yet.

Abul Mogard does the most warm, velvety, immersive ambient music that I know of, without being dull or cheesy about it. Dark but hopeful and comforting. This album was mentioned by several people as their favorite, and I understand why.

Kind of jazz-metal-fusion, but with electric harp. The album’s own tags for some reason are just “industrial” and “experimental” which it isn’t particularly, but okay. Emily Hopkins aka Harp Lady (but not the only Harp Lady out there — the one who does YouTube pedal reviews with her harp) with a bassist and a drummer, rocking out. It’s pretty great really, and too short. Want more!

Good ambient electronic stuff from a fellow that-one-TalkBass-thread denizen. I feel like, if there’s bass on this one, it’s integrated even more with the synth sounds than when I do it. Again, a nice and pleasant, varied listen, not boring or cheesy.

Atmospheric, drifting, mysterious. (“Dark” is an overused word in ambient perhaps.) “chimes” is essentially a windchime-like introduction, washing into a deep reverb; “chants” is placed in that same quasi-acoustic space but with a sort of damp rattle holding a trudging rhythm and a simple synth voice (with a gently distorted buzz at some frequencies, like a bad speaker) starting with a sort of swoopy repeated melody line and then breaking out into apparent improvisation. It’s not super sophisticated or complicated but what it is, is good in itself.

Modular synth improv, with the wavefolder and LPG thing and short loops pretty much front and center at times… I have so far treated this as truly ambient and just let my mind go off and do other things, but I want to give it a deep listen some time.

Mostly live improv stuff and mostly Buchla as Todd Barton is wont to do. A few of his personal experiments/studies/ideas. I have only previewed this a bit, but he seems to lean into negative space at times in a way that I have been considering for myself.

Dark atmospheric ambient meets dark Berlin techno. Heavy and hypnotic, and even if aspects of it do move briskly it’s not in a hurry overall. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m into it.

Religion stuff: this festival has been super uplifting for me, between just a lot more informal chatting and reminiscing, and the official stuff and extra heka (“magic” more or less) and prayers. I wish we could all get together in person again… though to be fair the “all” of the past was kind of an illusion, it was a core group of regulars who were able and a few who could manage it a couple of times. Covid and economics have made it more difficult. But maybe someday we’ll have a lesser Midwest gathering of some sort.

I had a lot of thoughts about which god(s) would preside over the coming year, mostly to do with all the different approaches for overcoming adversity and injustice. And apparently, this year’s answer is almost literally a full-spectrum approach: unconditional love, compassion and comfort, drawing together in solidarity, living up to one’s potential, shining and growing — but also standing firm and being unstoppable, and repelling evil with force. All of this was mentioned directly or alluded to. The god of the year is Ra-Heruakhety — sunlight from horizon to horizon, with special emphasis on the dawn.

I’m not a goth but I also tend to keep to the shadows, since I sunburn easily, am a little bit photosensitive in the eyes, and too much heat and bright light triggers anxiety. But I do appreciate the sun both literally and symbolically. As They Might Be Giants say, “here on Earth, there’d be no life without the light it gives,” and as Kormac says in Diablo III, “the Light is both the literal and figurative foe of evil,” and as Petronius and a whole lot of other people have said, “the sun shines for all.”

I have been waiting for the release of Titan Quest II for so long, that I kind of forgot about it… and suddenly an early access version dropped yesterday at a discount. I snatched it up, downloaded it, ran it… and it crashed. I restarted it, created a character… and it crashed, something about insufficient video memory. I started it up, turned down some settings, created the character again, got through an opening trailer… and it crashed again with the same error. Started it up, turned down more settings, smashed a couple of pots, opened my inventory… crash again.

Reboot.

Start it up. Turn down more graphical settings. Play for a few minutes… level up to 2, immediately don’t quite understand where I want to go with my training options. No magic to be seen yet, because I haven’t found a staff or whatever. Eh, I pick something. Go into the cave that I’m supposed to go into for an introductory quest, it starts stuttering really bad, then freezes and crashes.

Reboot.

Uninstall and ask for a refund.

I recall that Titan Quest did start off slowly and was a bit repetitive and tedious in its first couple of hours per playthrough, but picked up after a while and had some really fun special effects and spells. (Sacred and Sacred 2 also were like this… in fact there was a lot of tedious walking at the start for some professions.) But if you wanted to be more of a spellcaster type you definitely would have found a staff very quickly. Mostly though, I just think that style of gameplay has lost its charm for me, and the much more condensed action of Soulstone Survivors — despite also being repetitive and barely having any story — suits me better. It’s all about the replay and experimenting with different skill combinations. And Guild Wars 2 manages some amount of story stuff with replay value and variety; despite the initial, unskippable but short tutorial missions and starting in the same few zones, there’s enough there.

It’s OK, I have plenty to do without adding another game to obsess over.

The other day, I found out I got a raise. I used that as my excuse to go ahead and get myself another effects pedal, that OBNE Dark Star Stereo that I mentioned. And also, cables, because of the stupid TRS jacks on it that aren’t compatible with most other things. I am still waiting on the shipping though.

Still reading the Mabinogion Tetralogy. The “New Tribes” with their bizarre fixation on oppressing women, contrasted with the “Old Tribes” who don’t even believe that fathers are real, is just cheesy. The book really does not come across as particularly feminist, and the way basically all of the women are physically described makes me wonder if Evangeline Walton was either hamfistedly pandering to the male gaze or just a big fan of boobies herself. I have a notion to go find a plain translation after finishing the book, so I can note the differences…

end of line

Really frustrating morning at work today. And again this afternoon, after replacing the (cold) water filter under the sink, now we have no hot water pressure. Probably the little recirculation pump is gunky or busted after all these years and I’ll just bypass it, but… I have had enough annoyance today.

On the Kemetic Orthodox calendar, today is the last day of the year. The Ancient Egyptians had a 360-day calendar, which is mathematically much more convenient than ours. But that meant they needed 5-6 additional days between calendar years to keep things aligned. The new year began with the heliacal rising of the star Sopdet (which we call Sirius) over the capital. The Nile flood season would reliably be coming within days, bringing renewal to the land in that place with so little rainfall. Those intercalary days were each dedicated to a different major god, and full of celebrations and rituals against misfortune, making it the most important set of holidays in the religion.

I’ve got a couple of days off work next week to celebrate and relax, and a massage chair and float tank session booked for the time when our temple previously did one of its big initiatory rituals. The temple community has a lot of online events lined up.

In modern Kemetic Orthodoxy one of the most anticipated parts of this festival is the yearly oracle, which names the god(s) who will preside over the next year, sets the tone for the festival and year, and gives advice. It is the major communication from the gods to the community as a whole. In past years this has often been relevant in some way to ongoing or imminent world events, and to social and organizational aspects of the temple. Given how things are in the world right now, and the temple in the midst of figuring out its own reorganization, this year’s seems like it may be a particularly weighty one. All the gods in the pantheon are protectors of some kind, all have strength and magic, but their specialties and approaches, and the things they will ask us to keep in mind, vary.

Yesterday was supposed to be for AC maintenance and the gutters… but the gutter team, between the extreme heat and encountering some rotten wood at another job, got delayed again. Rescheduled for Friday, when it’s supposed to be cooler. Fingers crossed. Meanwhile, the basement waterproofing and drainage work is scheduled for the next Friday and Monday (they wanted to do it Monday and Tuesday at the peak of this festival but I asked them to move it back).

My spouse and I went to see Fantastic Four: First Steps last night. It was entertaining, not a disappointment, but we did pick it apart a bit on the drive home. Visually extremely well done, some issues with pacing and directing and weak plot moments and super-geniuses doing some blatantly stupid things. Also they could have leaned in more to both the retrofuturism and the emphasis that this was a slightly different universe. We saw it in the “CinemaX” format which has side projectors for a (sort of) seamless 270-degree view. That felt like a distracting gimmick at times, especially at the start, but I also felt like it worked well at other times. (It probably jacked up the cost of our tickets, and I wasn’t expecting that.) One of the small details I latched onto that I might not have without CinemaX, was noticing that they used standard US style 3-prong electrical outlets in this alternate anachronistic universe. Weird thing to focus on, but when the outlet is 18 feet high and hovering vaguely threateningly where there’s normally just a blank wall, the eyes are drawn to it.

Predictably, the usual neckbeards complained about the gender-swapped Silver Surfer, grumbling about “DEI” and blah blah blah. But Marvel drew her from comics canon, and it made as much sense to the plot as anything would (it is a very silly plot). It was no kind of feminist victory because the entire point was, she was sexy and Johnny Storm lusted after her. She was also badass though.

I’m now reading Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogion Tetralogy after it was featured in a couple of videos my spouse watched. It’s not a translation but a novelization with its own spin, the author having added some themes of her own. The Mabinogion consists of four “branches” which aren’t directly related, and in this book the first branch is divided into two “books”. I feel like through much of that first book, we just don’t have enough of a sense of who Pwyll is as a person or what the society is like; he doesn’t even interact with any named characters aside from his horse before he’s already having a very strange encounter with the lord of the dead (who is also kind of a cipher for a while). By the time the second book is well underway things are a bit better.

But I’ll give the author some credit for use of vivid descriptive language, at least in places. And probably for those who haven’t read a lot of folklore translations or maybe certain other kinds of fantasy, the whole thing is pretty neat. I’ll stick with it and see how I feel about it as I go.

mind in the gutter

I’m so frustrated with the gutter cleaning company right now.

On May 29, I contacted them via their web form, and filled in a bunch of info. I said I wanted a cleaning, and gave VERY SPECIFIC details about a very simple repair that needs doing (*), a modification that the basement waterproofing company is going to do for the drain in another corner, and that I would like them to look it over to see if they recommend any repairs.

I get an email… that I need to call them to schedule. What’s the point of the web form then? I call them, and mention, again, cleaning and repairs. I got scheduled for a free estimate two weeks later.

The night before that’s supposed to happen, at 10:30 PM, I got a text asking if the gutters had leaf guards. No, they don’t. They said they would do their estimate based on the Google Maps overhead view “so I don’t have to wait to get my estimate.” Uh… hmm. I got that in email the next morning, and paid. Within a couple more days, the work was scheduled for the week July 14.

The day came, and I got a text saying the crew was running late on another job and had to reschedule, this time for July 23. They’d arrive somewhere in a window of noon to 3PM. A couple of days in advance, I get the same confirmation request I’ve now seen three times before (with no response to texting back “C”).

The day comes. Noon passes, and I haven’t been contacted. 1PM. 2PM. 3PM… dogs bark, and there’s a truck with the company logo sitting across the street. Okay.

Nothing happens for a while, I don’t hear anything. No banging around, nobody on the roof, no power washer, no text, no phone call, no knock on the door. But the dogs bark again… the truck is gone.

The next morning I get a call. Apparently, the guy said “repairs were needed” which apparently took him by surprise, and that a crew would come out NEXT week and I’d probably be contacted by someone else from the office. Which I was last night in a weird generic-sounding typo-ridden email from their… sales department?

Couple of links to start off this post:

The Hater’s Guide to the AI Bubble — this shows what’s wrong with the “AI Trade” from a business perspective. Quick summary: 35% of the US stock market right now is held up by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and Apple buying hardware from NVidia for their AI projects. They’ve spend $560 billion in the past two years and show maybe $35 billion in profit for it. 42% of NVidia’s revenue is selling stuff to those companies, their stock price relies on continued sales growth, and… that growth is showing signs of slumping. Nobody really has a viable plan to make AI profitable, there’s not all that much room in the market for different AI services, and there have been a lot of really questionable claims being made to convince investors. It’s all going to come tumbling down.

And of course, there are new stories every day about the failure of AI when people attempt to trust it. This stupid thing about AI wiping a database and then explaining that it “panicked and acted without thinking” and disobeyed explicit instructions… honestly it sounds like fiction, and I don’t know if it’s true. The FDA has a new AI that’s supposed to speed new drug approvals, but it just makes up studies that don’t exist and can’t find ones that do. An eating disorder help line, after the employees unionized, fired them and replaced them with a chatbot that gave people horrible awful harmful advice until it was shut down.

And: One in six US workers pretends to use AI to please the bosses

Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower

…

Why Anti-Trans Campaigns Keep Returning to the Politics of Meat — in American culture, beef and (white) masculinity are closely intertwined. (Cis people, are you okay?) The beef industry has been funding anti-trans political ads, some of which compare trans people and cattle.

Reading that has turned me back away from beef. For 7 years starting in my late teens, I was a vegetarian; even since then I generally have eaten less beef than most Americans probably, keeping in mind that beef is much more of a strain on the environment than chicken or vegetables. So this isn’t a hard choice for me. I’m not at a 100% boycott level, but can keep it for special/rare occasions. Recently we’ve had some recipes with Impossible crumbles instead, and I’ve steered clear of ordering beef when I’m out.

I’m slowly putting down replacement planks for the living room floor. The spare planks aren’t super flat, and the original adhesive is grossly sticky to the fingers but not really enough to keep the planks in place. I’m enhancing that with some Loctite spray adhesive, and trying to squash the planks flat as I go. So I’m only doing 1-2 planks at a time. Professionals use heavy floor rollers for this sort of thing, but they are expensive and useless for literally any other task — I’m just using my own considerable body weight and then a collection of random heavy things. A cast iron pan, the dog food bin, a big shopping bag full of Playstation games, the theremin on its weighted stand, the recliner… it’s absurd, but it seems to be working more or less.

I don’t think it’s possible to so thoroughly eliminate the pee scent that a dog’s VNO couldn’t detect it. Nor to so thoroughly seal the planks to the floor that it prevents anything from seeping underneath. So we’re going to have to break Yankee of the habit of peeing in there, and if that means continuing to block access to the room with baby gates, so be it. To our surprise, he hasn’t made any messes in the kitchen or dining room since we blocked the living room — something he used to do on occasion. Fingers crossed. Usually when he stops one neurotic behavior he only exchanges it for a different one…

10 songs now done for Suspension. Since some of them are short by my standards, this comes to 40 minutes. I’ll be doing a few more.

Suspended chords made for easy inspiration for this one, but I’m definitely not sticking strictly to it. In some tracks the connection might be a bit tenuous, in that I have some complex cluster created by Multimod or the “Voice Chorus” detuning in Synclavier V, and then I have pitch shifters tuned to fourths and fifths up, or something along those lines. Or I’m doing a lot of complex stuff but have peaking filters set to resonate a bit more on a sus4 chord.

Current read is Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides. This book was written in 1987, and was the inspiration for LucasArts’ Monkey Island series. Disney bought the rights to the novel, but their POTC movie is a very, very different story with different characters and plot. What it has in common: (1) the Fountain of Youth (2) a daughter of another character (but not the same character), (3) Blackbeard as a Vodun practitioner, and (4) some other pirates, who happen to be in the Caribbean.

We listened to the book in audio form during a road trip several years ago. It only partially stuck with me, because that’s how audiobooks on road trips are… if you’re driving you’re putting more attention on the road, and if not driving you might be dozing. And also, this way I missed out some significant puns based on pirates’ illiteracy and minimal knowledge of Vodun. As with other Tim Powers books, it takes me a little longer to slide into enjoying it at first, for reasons I can’t identify… but I’m thoroughly hooked well before the halfway point.