It only happens in games, and specific games… and mostly racing games. In fact… it only happens when I’m using the XBox wireless controller.
And sure enough, if I go looking I can find other people saying that games crash when they use the controller and don’t when they don’t, and the advice is always to update the controller using the (free) “XBox Accessories” app from Microsoft’s silly Windows App Store.
So maybe that’s been the problem all along. Something else to try anyway.
Intellijel just surprise-announced the release of a new delay module, the Sealegs. It does tape and BBD and old-school reverb and warbly wobbly stuff and I love what I’m hearing. I’m not sure it’s doing anything I can’t already do, but it’s a really thoughtfully designed module.
It’s 20HP. I would not try to replace my Mimeophon with it. jroo Loop maybe but that doesn’t clear enough space, so I’d have to part with Synchrodyne or Interstellar Radio.
Not going to act on this right now. Knobcon is coming and I might fall in love with some module there.
Yesterday afternoon I went to the infrared sauna. As usual, I didn’t particularly enjoy the heat (especially on my face) and it didn’t feel like it did much for the worst area of my back, but other muscles relaxed and I felt better overall when it was over than before it began.
There was heavy traffic on the way back home, and for a while I was behind a car with a bumper sticker that said:
Back off, bumper humper! MY brakes are good, how is your insurance?
…in text too small to read without getting dangerously close, at least in moving traffic. I had no idea what it said until we stopped at a traffic light, but I can easily imagine less safe drivers tailgating that car just to read the sticker.
The new RAM came today. I put it in and… the computer didn’t boot at all. Hmm. Checked the internet to make sure I was putting the things in the right slots. Pulled them out and put them back. Nothing. Tried the advice of just using one at a time to see if one was defective. Nothing.
Realized I was trying to install them backwards and they weren’t actually seated in their slots because of the notch to prevent that from happening, but the little tabs you push to lock them in place looked locked. Not a great design there, Asus. (On the very first PC I had, a 10Mhz “Turbo XT” 8088 with 640K of RAM, me and my boss who was helping me build it put every single RAM chip in backwards and fried one that way. That was when that was something like 20 individual chips in plain sockets.)
With a little more fiddling I got it to boot with one, then a lot more fiddling and the second one finally slid home and… what’s this? It’s running them at 2133Mhz when the package very clearly says 3200. And the motherboard detected them as 3200 but ran them at 2133 anyway. More web searching… ah, you have to enable DOCP, which sounds like some kind of overclocking thing. And now it says it’s running at 1597Mhz… what? More searching… since it’s “DDR” (dual data rate) you have to double that reported clock speed to get the actual speed. Uh, sure, OK.
Fire up New Star GP, and… BOOM, it crashes pretty much right away.
A little more searching. “Update your BIOS firmware,” a lot of people said. Mine was from 2019 and there have been approximately twelve billion fixes since then. After more digging than I should have had to do to find the software that let me apply BIOS updates… that’s done. I was able to play New Star GP for a while without crashing, but just now I started Art of Rally and… nope, crash!
It’s the Computer of Theseus. Replace all the parts and it’s still the same inexplicably-crashing-only-when-playing-certain-video-games computer.
There’s a thread on MW called “What’s the point?” which asks:
Just saw on another thread a few people expressing regret about having spent loads of time/money on gear and not achieving much – got me thinking, what do you do it all for?
There are many good answers, of course. One of the common ones is it’s not about achievement and people should simply stop feeling guilty/regretful for pursuing an “unproductive” hobby. People make music (or even just sounds) for many reasons, and making doesn’t have to mean creating a product for someone else to consume.
I happen to like finishing and releasing albums — even if they’re self-published and earn maybe a few bucks and a few nice comments at most. It’s certainly not meant to be a money-making endeavor, and it’s not about recognition or validation. I’m generally an anxious type, but one area where I feel quite confident is that I make some pretty good music. That’s according to my own tastes, but I’m also confident that my musical taste is valid.
I could just finish individual tracks and share them, but to me there’s still something of value in the album. I like listening to them for one, rather than skipping around at random. And to me the format both demands and creates a bit more coherence and continuity, and sets a somewhat higher expectation of quality. In some cases I’ve also played to the format with longer “suites” of several sessions that flow together. “Packaging” it all with a name and some artwork feels like it adds something too.
I really do all of this just for myself, not to please an audience. I think that’s the most honest thing one can do in the arts. But it’s nice that some other people happen to like what I do — I love getting comments, and appreciate that some folks are willing to throw a little bit of financial encouragement as well — so, thank you to those who are doing either of those things. And really, thank you to anyone who’s even just listening, and I hope you get some enjoyment from it even though I’m not making it for you in particular. It just means you have interesting tastes. 🙂
My own opinion of my work varies — I thankfully have never gotten into a state where I dislike everything I’ve done and wonder why I bother. (That’s much more of a short-term thing; sometimes if I have two or three “failed” sessions in a row I can feel like I’ve lost my way.) But my opinions of various past work certainly do fall and rise over time. In the past, I’ve been surprised when musicians said in an interview that they dislike a particular album or song which I particularly liked, but now instead, I’m just wondering if they came back around on those opinions.
I was listening to it yesterday, wondered what something was, knew I had notes but they were in my YouTube posts and I had no map between the track titles on the album and their Jamuary dates. Bleh. So I decided to correct the oversight.
I think for the next album I’m going back to keeping patch notes.
So with this “new” (2019) computer I started, at some point, having issues with some games — only ever games, and not all of them — doing something odd:
going to a black screen and then recovering after a pause of about two seconds
going to a black screen, my monitors losing their color profile settings, and the game hanging
a weird glitchy thing that happens semi-frequently but doesn’t interrupt gameplay.
I’m not sure when this started, but getting a second monitor seems to have made it worse. That second monitor is extremely useful when working from home and can be handy other times too (such as when making music).
At first I thought it was strictly an Art of Rally issue, because it happened after an update and at the time, that was the only game crashing. It was also after a graphics driver update, but I rolled back, tried beta drivers, etc. and nothing really seemed to help… until I went back to an even older driver and it seemed to stop.
And then another game would freak out with the black-screen-then-recover thing. And some games I tried on Steam would crash very quickly. And Art of Rally started doing it again.
I got a new video card a couple of months ago and it stopped. Aha! …and then it started again. Much more rare than before in Art of Rally, but still, it was happening. So were some other crashes though, after an update… so maybe not the card’s fault.
…except more games did it. Today, I picked up New Star GP which admittedly, just went into Early Access, and it had the exact same symptoms as Art of Rally. This new card is an AMD when the old one was an NVidia, so… it can’t be the card. Not overheating because it’s not even turning on the cooling fan. Power supply issues? Nah, I’m good (I intentionally went for relatively low wattage cards). Something else?
A quick Google search and I saw where someone else with a Ryzen CPU had weird issues with certain games crashing, and only games… ah. And their issue was the wrong RAM frequency set in their BIOS.
I checked and found mine was set to auto, but it said 2666 Mhz. That’s funny, the invoice for this computer says 3200. Either I got cheaper RAM than I paid for (and there are problems that look like this other person’s) or the board is just detecting the wrong speed. I set it to 3200, and we’ll see how that goes.
UPDATE: nope, it did not fix it. And I most likely was sent the wrong RAM… 4 years ago. I’m gonna go ahead and get some DDR4-3200 RAM because it’s fairly cheap to try it.
I completely forgot to post the announcement here, but I released the new album on Friday!
My spouse encountered the word “betweenity” in a list of unusual words that should be more common, and I agree.
I was going to use the name anyway, so it is a handy coincidence that the album was released on the last “day upon the year” of the Kemetic Orthodox calendar — a set of 5 (sometimes 6) days inserted between the end and beginning of a 360-day calendar year. In that religion, that is a time of uncertainty and disruption, but also celebration and ritual as each day celebrates the birth of one of the major gods. At dawn of the first day of the new year, everything is put right, and the Nile flood follows (allowing life-sustaining agriculture, kind of a big deal!)
I was Kemetic Orthodox for several years, a priest in fact. My religious status for the past several years could be described as betweenity. I don’t not believe, and I still love the gods, but at the same time, I am not participating as part of the temple or praying regularly. (*) This is something that I’m generally at peace with, even though I don’t particularly know why I’m at peace with it. (And I can imagine experienced Kemetic Orthodox folks nodding and saying “that sounds exactly what a Seshat child would say, if you can get them to talk in the first place,” and, well, yeah.)
Near the end of each year, there is a specific festival in which an oracle declares which god(s) will preside over the coming year. For this year, it is Nefertem, “the Beautifully Complete”, and a lot of it went right to my heart. I don’t, at this time, see myself returning to the temple but this is giving me something to think about.
(*) a bit here to make my stance clear on something. I very much dislike the closed-minded dogmatism of certain major religions. A large part of what drew me to Kemetic Orthodoxy is that it claims no exclusivity to “The Truth” — it can’t, it has multiple different creation stories, gods older than their own parents or who existed before the first god created himself, etc. It has no opposition to or denial of science, nor other religions. And the rules for being a good human all basically come down to “don’t ruin it for other people.” And it doesn’t proselytize. If I had to summarize what the point of the religion is, I would say it’s an art rather than a poor substitute for science, and it can give personal meaning, motivation, peace and strength.
Coincidentally, not long after what I said in the last post about additive synthesis, GuyaGuy on the MW forum said this about Arturia Synclavier V:
“Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys playing with harmonic oscillators and spectral transfer filters in modular but wants polyphony and similar-but-different tonal options.”
Those were the magic words. I’d kind of stayed away from the synth because the interface is a bit weird. All of the “V” synths have skeuomorphic UIs that at least somewhat imitate the original hardware they emulate, for better or for worse, plus some extras. In this case, they gave the main panel more knobs (good, even if they are virtual!) and put the “screen” interface on a separate tab. There’s a lot going on with this synth so there’s probably not much choice about that. It seems complex at first glance, and that’s because in total, it is. It doesn’t help that the Synclavier uses “partial” to describe one layer in a voice, rather than the usual definition it has in additive synthesis. But each “partial” is a relatively simple additive synthesis layer (or a sample player) with an FM modulator.
Once I sussed out the interface though, I found that I like it a lot. The “chorus” option isn’t an effect (except that it has an FX section too, in its additional goodies) but a doubling of the voice, at a freely tunable ratio. A few of those, some inharmonic FM, and you can make some pretty wild sounds with this thing.
The Synclavier was an extremely important piece of digital synth history. Originally an additive synth in 1977, over the next few years it added multiple layers, FM, and then the first 16-bit sampling available, then the first polyphonic sampling, all at very high spec for the time. It was built entirely on custom hardware and software — some of which was repurposed for scientific research and medical applications, as nobody at the time was building off-the-shelf analog-to-digital converters — and each unit was in the $25,000-$200,000 range depending on options.
And it sounds wild. The iconic opening sound to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” was done with a Synclavier II preset, exactly mimicking a sequence that was on an obscure synth demo record. There’s still very little out there like it; additive synths have generally been rare, and Yamaha FM synths have a very different architecture.
Sometimes I just have to reflect on how amazing software plugins are.
Another thing I’m planning to give a serious try is Fabfilter Saturn, a flexible saturation/distortion plugin. I have Wavesfactory Spectre and some other options, but this kind of seems to be the king in this area, and another forum comment associating it with resonators seems encouraging…
I tried a new third-party Versio firmware over the weekend, and found it wasn’t really to my liking. Rather than putting Yester or Melotus back on, I went with Ruina and found it’s got some different flavor than the software plugin. It inspired a doomy dark ambient recording, with Rings as the sound source (again, not sounding “like Rings”). I think I’ll run with this for a while.
That album really is moving along — I expect I’m now just one track from calling it complete, and I have the foundation of that track already recorded. Bandcamp Friday is this week, and it’s kind of tempting to push hard and get it finished in time, but I don’t want to rush it either. We’ll see.
That new office chair was a nice boost in comfort and tends to improve my posture. (I’ve also found I can play the Miezo with the arms still on the chair, no problem.) Now we’ve got a new cat bed upstairs too, and that has calmed Rico down some, and that has meant more and better sleep. When we had our big power outage a couple of weeks ago, I noticed he slept more peacefully and bothered us a bit less. Cats do tend to run hotter than humans, so I thought he might appreciate a self-warming cat bed (reflecting his body heat). And indeed he does.
Yumi and the Nightmare Painter crossed some kind of threshold and I’m very much into it now. It’s got some of the hilarity and sweetness of Tress of the Emerald Sea, but with different flavors. Some pretty clever puns that ambushed me, a fun pair of magic systems based on art, and a great weirdo character (different from the now fairly familiar weirdo world-hopping narrator/artist/trickster).
TVTropes probably has a name for a character that doesn’t quite fit in — an alien or spirit or other fish-out-of-water type who knows a lot more than they let on, but isn’t very good at pretending to be a normal human, and is kind of random and goofy. They are simultaneously endearing to the reader, exasperating (although possibly also endearing) to other characters, and yet often they are also deeply alarming and disquieting. They often have a combination of childlike innocence and deep insight and the questioning of aspects of humanity and society that we take for granted.
I love those sorts of characters.
This evening after work I managed to record two more tracks for the next album. The first one was just sort of a normal process. I had a couple of looped samples of some complex modulated Euclidean rhythms already recorded from a previous session of messing around, extracted gates from one of them with an envelope follower and comparator in Bitwig Grid, used those to trigger Rings, and ring-modulated the sample against Rings. (Blah blah Rings always sounds the same blah blah snort.) Added a drone from Odessa through Beads and Koszalin to it, and then added a second layer where I used jroo Loop with modulated rate as a crude and wobbly means of detuning. Added a lead part with Akemie’s Castle through the WitchBrute, played from 0-Coast. It all flowed nicely and I was pleased.
The second one wasn’t going to be a recording… just an experiment to answer a question on a forum. But it led to a bit further tinkering, which led to a little more, and the next thing I knew I had a lovely drone going, with about seven different controls I could fruitfully tweak to vary the timbre and chord. It was Shapeshifter being phase-modulated in Mimeophon by the other Shapeshifter oscillator, with some tweaking and cross-modulation between them, feeding into Spectraphon. A touch of Raum on the result. Very rich raw material to work with. I just let it drone, modulated Shifter’s Osc1 with a random LFO from Clep Diaz, turned some knobs and zoned out. Lovely.
Before I did my Shapeshifter study, I usually kept the module in the Basic1 wavetable all the time. Afterward, I usually keep it in Harmo3 all the time. Very simple additive harmonics, going into some kind of distortion, and/or used as a carrier and/or modulator, is really fertile ground as far as I’m concerned — and it’s something I’ve been doing quite a lot of over the years. Harmonic oscillators, drawbar organs, certain FM patches, Odessa with the partials set low. Spectraphon too now. Rings, to some extent, is in this neighborhood. It’s related to my fascination with FM and wavefolding and their relationship.
Music of the spheres, I guess — simple harmonic motion. It’s all circles, sine waves, or masses and springs, pendulums, etc.
The chair I’ve been using at home for the past few years was a little bit of a compromise, so it could be a reasonable price to put on my wish list. It had the required weight capacity, good reviews, armrests that fold up out of the way, and nice aesthetics. It was a decent chair for the price — but given how much time I spend in that chair between working, gaming, web browsing and making music, more comfortable is always better. It’s always had odd pops and squeaks, but more recently it’s started randomly sinking too.
Andaseat had a Prime Day special (even though it’s not affiliated with Amazon) on the Kaiser 3 gaming chair, so I went for it. It’s a very good chair! Sturdy, heavy, not fun to assemble or get through doors, but worth it. It has serious padding, a nice tall backrest, a magnetic pillow you can place wherever you like, an adjustable lumbar support, adjustable armrests, and tilt/rocking but also an adjustable backrest angle. It can go way back into a sleep-friendly position. It’s not making any distressing noises under my weight.
I do miss the retractable armrests of the older chair. Too bad there’s no release button for them, instead of having to unbolt them to remove them. I’ll do that if they interfere with musical instruments, but I find them nice to have when leaning back a lot.
Sunday we took a short trip to Columbia Bottom Conservation Area, which is sort of a managed and planted area not primarily for industrial/food agriculture but meant to benefit wildlife (mostly waterfowl and pollinators, in this case). They have impressive fields of sunflowers, each one keeping 1-4 bees at a time gainfully employed. It was a hot day (but not overwhelmingly so, yet) and the gravel roads were extremely dusty, each car kicking up thick clouds that obscured the road for everyone else, but I enjoyed the experience.
I don’t think my photos really do justice to standing among hundreds of 5-foot tall flowers. They weren’t “as far as the eye can see” except for a short person (and there were shorter patches as well) but still, it was really neat.
I’ve reread the Imperial Radch trilogy, and it was maybe even better than I remembered. This sort of rereading is helpful, as the newer book shone a light on some of the little mysteries of the trilogy, and vice versa. But now I’m curious to read the short stories too; one of them goes into Justice of Toren‘s (or is it One Esk Nineteen’s?) history as a religious figure in the Itran Tetrarchy, which should be fun.
Currently reading the 3rd Brandon Sanderson Secret Project book, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter. While I didn’t find myself immediately charmed and engaged with it like I did Tress of the Emerald Sea, the setting has got some cool concepts to it. It is a very odd, fantastic, and extremely visually striking world — and with a magic system based on painting too, I kind of want this to be a very stylish animated movie or graphic novel. But I’ll stick with the words and see what my imagination can do for me visually.
(I have aphantasia — I don’t “see with my mind’s eye” except in rare circumstances, or when I dream. I don’t really imagine characters’ faces or what buildings look like when I read books. I wonder if this is related in any way to my poor navigational skills and sense of direction. But I do find some kinds of visual cues helpful, for instance, viewing signals and audio with an oscilloscope, or graphs and charts to visualize data.)
I have 31 minutes of music recorded toward the next album. And, same old story, I went through a phase of feeling a little lost and unsure where I was going with it, and recorded a couple of things I wound up rejecting or partially recycling. But then I found kind of a common thread. It’s just the natural result of chronological proximity, and exploration of the new gear, new arrangement and the new techniques they’re leading me toward.
The gear influences the composition. Interstellar Radio doesn’t track 1V/Oct, so sequencing it tends more toward free tuning and atonality. Spectraphon, while it does track pitch very well, will give different timbral results if its input pitch is sequenced. Univer Inter and the Seaboard Block give me new ways to control and play things — a bit more rhythmic stuff and some generative MIDI with UI’s clocks, and more pressure-controlled polyphonic goodness among other things. The Strega/Minibrute pairing seems really fruitful to me and I’ve been loving that. And of course, having access to different timbres leads one to different density and complexity and rates of change in composition, in general. And so the new stuff influences how I use some of the old stuff too.
