Uncategorized – STARTHIEF

rendering unto Caesar

I really dislike bureaucratic stuff. I recognize the need for at least some level of it, but it always seems so dire. Like if you screw up filling out a form you can go to jail forever or pay huge fines, or something. And there’s all this weird jargon and poorly worded instructions… I think of myself as a fairly smart person in most respects but that shit usually throws me.

The US has ridiculous, overcomplicated tax laws, due to capitalists lobbying to avoid paying as much tax as possible, legislators using tax credits, exemptions, and things like IRA and 401k retirement accounts as tools… and the tax prep industry lobbying to keep it complicated so people need to pay professionals to fill out forms. For the last couple of years I have been using FreeTaxUSA, which handles a majority of tax situations at no charge, and state filing is cheap. (Yes, that’s another complication in the US — every state has different laws for income tax and property tax, and more forms to fill out.)

I was working on our taxes last night, got to the section on IRA (individual retirement account) contributions and ran into a problem: my contributions were more than twice the maximum, and had been for the past few years. I was going to get hit with really stiff penalties if I didn’t transfer money out of it (and get an additional tax form to add to the return).

(When thinking about this stuff I always find it useful to remind myself that money isn’t real. It isn’t natural. It’s a 100% invented thing and yet it holds an incredible amount of importance in our society. And money absolutely does not correlate to a person’s goodness or worthiness, in fact the people with the most money in our society skew heavily toward scumbags. A lot of unnecessary suffering and waste could be alleviated if other people were willing to give up their greed and their fixation on capitalism.)

Anyway, at that point I figured I needed to call my employer’s financial advisor and gave up on it for the night. So of course my attempt at sleep was plagued by worry, intrusive thoughts, and weird vaguely financial, vaguely black magic-ish dreams.

This morning I was looking over the emails and forms about it and realized: what I have is a “Simple IRA”, not a “Traditional IRA.” The simple IRA limits are much higher and I was within them. No cause for alarm, I am not going to be thrown into the gulag (at least not for this). I finished filing this morning, and my federal and state refunds for 2024 are approximately what they were for 2023. That’ll help cover some of the home repair stuff.

On the pains/medical scare: Sunday, I found that the chest pain would return somewhat as each Toradol dose wore off, but not as bad as Friday night or Saturday. But since Monday I have taken none of the pills at all and had no chest pain. (Just more typical back pain, tense shoulders and so on.)

On shaving: that LESSN soap I recommended does not last very long. It’s gotten very thin and a corner has broken off. I don’t know if it just wears down that much from use or needs to be better protected from general shower moisture. I have another bar arriving Friday, but I’m also going to try some other options. I’ve got some samples from Southern Witchcrafts on the way — sadly not their “Incorporeal” scent-free shave soap since that was sold out, but some scents I might like — as well as “A Midnight Dreary” from Catie’s Bubbles and a synthetic shaving brush.

I also found that once my Pacific Shaving Co. pre-shave oil (commonly referred to as PSO) ran out, the shave soap was still pretty good but not quite as good. Like the difference between mastered and unmastered music. 🙂 I went shopping around for various options and decided to try “Smolder” pre-shave oil from The Blades Grim. It does the trick maybe 80% as well as PSO for 20% of the price and the scent is pleasant.

I prefer to find more gender-neutral options in terms of the scents and branding. A lot of shaving stuff is coded extremely masculine (ALPHA LUMBERJACK KING COBRA OUTLAW AR-15 HAIR ANNIHILATOR WITH 100% TEXAS LONGHORN BEEF TALLOW AND PINE TAR… FOR SENSITIVE SKIN) and that’s right out. I also prefer to skip over stuff that has a totally unnecessary “For Men” or “For Women” attached to it because I’d like to gently discourage the “Bic Pens For Her” phenomenon as much as my tiny amount of consumer influence can. That still does leave some good options though.

We’re still waiting on a date for the wall repairs to begin. The contractor said he was waiting on permits. Monday I came home from work to see somebody or other had marked the location of a pipe with blue paint (meaning, if the internet is correct, it’s carrying potable water):

But wait, what did they do on the second wall?

…they painted the scraggly, mostly-dead vines, completely missing the ground and the wall. I mean, it’s not like all of that isn’t going away anyway — blocks, dirt, and plants except for the cherry tree on the top level — but it just struck me as especially funny.

Books! I finished Moomvalley in November but it didn’t strike me with the same sense of sweet melancholy the same way as it did when I read it the first time. I think I simply may have burned out on Moomin stuff by trying to read all of them close together.

Dauntless was not mindblowing, but was entertaining enough. I felt at first like it was borrowing concepts from other novels, but once things started coming together, that feeling faded to “maybe loosely inspired” at most. It was also one of the least queer books I’ve read in some time, simply because the protagonist is merely a lesbian and the most spicy thing that happens on the page is some kissing.

Now I’m reading C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, which is a retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche. It was described and quoted in Sacred Gender, and I read elsewhere that many consider it his finest work (or in some cases, his only good work). It’s really engaging. The setting is the fictional kingdom of Glome near Greece; one of the characters is a Greek philosopher enslaved by the king; the narrator an ugly half-sister of the inhumanly beautiful princess Psyche, who she loves very much. She rebels against society when Psyche is sacrificed to a god. While it’s not exactly feminist, it’s perhaps a little bit proto-feminist in some respects? A major theme is about faith vs. doubt vs. skepticism, which isn’t a surprise for Lewis of course, but he’s presenting it in a more polytheistic way. Also the motives of religious and political establishments are called into question, and personal gnosis vs. commonly held beliefs and perceptions. The writing style is excellent (if it occasionally feels a tiny bit anachronistic), but one might wish Lewis had Tolkien’s gift for naming places and people in a more authentically Greek-adjacent way.

losses to the music world

Sadly, two people in the music world who I knew somewhat have passed away within the last week.

Jonathan Sterne, aka JES, is someone I knew from the Lines forum, as well as the one thread that keeps me at TalkBass: “Ambient/Post-Rock/Textural bass playing” where we talk as much about synths as bass, and about ambient-appropriate effects probably a bit more than either; it’s where the folks convinced me to go for the Miezo that I like so much.

JES always struck me as kind, thoughtful, clever and creative. At the point where I knew him, he was a very solid bass player and touch guitarist, and was starting to explore modular synthesis and “West Coast” synths like the Majella Implexus. The most recent album he was involved with (that I know about) was this:

As it turns out, he was a professor — a historian of music technology, a scholar of disability, and co-director of the online magazine Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. I’ve read essays that he’s written, without connecting them to this nice guy I knew online. (I may have even, without awareness, quoted stuff from another essay in a book he was published in, in a thread he was participating in.)

The other person is more well known among synth geeks: Paul T. Schreiber (aka paults), founder of Synthesis Technology and the MOTM modular synth format, engineer behind the Moog/Tandy Realistic Concertmate MG-1 (one of the world’s first budget synths). MOTM was a format very similar to the original Moog modular format, but with better engineering standards. When Eurorack grew in popularity, SynthTech began releasing modules in that format as well, and Paul became one of the most influential designers in that industry — not just through his products but through sharing electrical engineering knowledge.

Paul was smart, funny, and opinionated; generous and a great storyteller. Aside from interacting with him on forums, I was a beta tester for his E352 Cloud Terrarium, and beta tester #1 for his E370 Quad Morphing VCO. (He shipped me the prototype, had me test it a while and send it on to musician Robert Rich; after a couple of other testers, it was sent back to me and I was allowed to keep the prototype. I eventually wound up selling it, as it just wasn’t as well suited to my own musical needs as some other things.) I had a lot of feedback about the FM on it, and I had a few arguments with him and his DSP guy Andrew Belt (of VCV Rack) over some details but all of the discussion stayed cool-headed and respectful on all sides.

Both of them will be missed. I’m going to dedicate my next album to them, and add one more item to my rules:

the even-numbered tracks must also include at least one SynthTech VCV Rack module. (Since I don’t own any of the hardware anymore.)

not how I had planned to spend the day

Friday night I had some back pain — nothing that unusual for me. After sitting a while in the recliner with the shiatsu massage thingy, I took a couple of Aleve PM and went to bed.

Then my chest started feeling tight, hurting when I’d take a deep breath. That started to get a bit scary for a while; though “heart stuff” still seemed unlikely to me and anxiety seemed more likely, or even some kind of muscle strain. Still, I did not sleep well between the pain and worry, and in the morning I asked my spouse to take me to urgent care. (And of course, there’s the thing where, if it’s caused or worsened by anxiety, worrying about it can only make it worse…)

I got right in to an exam room (a first in my experience with urgent care clinics). It did take a little while to see the doc, but he said with my medical history (diabetes, parents with heart issues, age) that I really should go to an ER and be checked for heart issues, since their clinic wasn’t equipped to do the blood tests that he would want. He recommended Missouri Baptist as being the best for heart stuff and also not as busy an ER. An assistant did an EKG, and sent me on my way with the printout. (All it found was “early repolarization” which apparently isn’t that unusual in healthy young folks anyway.)

The MoBap ER prioritized me and had me on another EKG in under a minute, put in an IV port and took blood for the first round of tests; within 20 minutes I’d been put in a room, changed into a hospital gown, given a nice pre-warmed blanket, wheeled to get chest x-rays and then returned to my room and given another warm blanket. And then… waiting on test results. I got signed up on MyChart so I could see them as they came in, which was nice because it often took a while afterward before a nurse or doctor would come talk to me.

After a while, they did a second round of blood tests to screen for a possible clot and to follow up on a blood test (there’s one they do in 2-hour intervals to check for rising enzymes which indicate a heart attack). Everything came back normal, except somewhat elevated white blood cell count. After what seemed like a lot of waiting, the doctor told me I don’t have anything dangerous going on with my heart, and no pneumonia or lung issues. He wouldn’t say it is (or isn’t) anxiety; acid reflux seemed unlikely due to the set of symptoms but advised me that antacids aren’t a bad idea anyway, and said the most likely thing is pericarditis (swelling of the lining outside the heart) due to a viral infection of some kind. He prescribed Toradol, a strong NSAID. The first dose of it I got via the IV port didn’t seem to do much… but when I was discharged, standing up out of that hospital bed I noticed I was feeling a bit more comfortable. A while after taking it in pill form, even more so. And this morning there’s almost no pain at all — I have to bend over weirdly and take a real deep breath to get the chest pain, and the back pain is no worse than my usual and can be pretty easily ignored.

So. It wasn’t a fun day, but I am relieved and grateful that it’s not something worse and that I’m not stuck with mysterious pain.

one damn thing after another

Our weekend power outage lasted 46 hours, my parents’ lasted 67.

On Tuesday, my parents’ neighborhood had a water main break and they had a 6 hour boil water order. And then our power went out right after lunch and I had to drive in to work to finish my workday.

Wednesday, from about 4 to 5:30, the power went out again — 4 or 5 times for a few seconds or a couple of minutes at a time. Then it went out for about 40 minutes; when they got it back on the listed cause was “equipment damage”, so maybe it’ll finally stay on reliably now? Regardless, I’m finally buying a UPS; that rapid off/on/off/on stuff concerns me.

But also Wednesday, we had some strong wind and it ripped some siding partway off our house. It and other stuff was banging around, which startled the dogs, who knocked some stuff over. At one point my spouse got up to see what the noise was and I didn’t see what happened, but her mountain dulcimer broke in what seems like an unlikely way, a relatively solid piece of wood just sheared right off. (Should that also count as storm damage?)

This morning (Thursday), Spectrum (our internet provider) is having some kind of outage. They didn’t send any notifications about it, so I wasted some time rebooting my router etc. But I was finally able to get through on my phone and check. So here I am working in the office again.

At this point I’m just going to say that California governor Gavin Newsom — who seems to be making a play for the next presidential election — is a coward and a hypocrite. The sort of career politician who just goes where the wind blows. He’s been “liberal” because California wanted a liberal, but right now he seems to think MAGA is ascendant so he’s following their lead. He’s recently spoken out against trans athletes, and against people stating their pronouns. His podcast has been him talking to shitbags like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk — and not challenging them on their bullshit at all. I didn’t know this before, but apparently as mayor of SF, he had a drinking problem; he had an affair with an underling who was married to his campaign manager; he dated a 19-year old model at age 39. As governor, he went to a fancy dinner party at a posh restaurant with no mask, during COVID lockdown.

He is absolutely not the sort of person we need to lead us out of the mess we’re in; he’s exactly the opposite.

bolt from the blue

Serum has been one of the top wavetable-based software synthesizers for quite some time, a direct competitor to Massive. It predates my getting into Eurorack, and I used Serum’s wavetable editing tools to create banks for the SynthTech E352/E370. But other than that, my usage of it really fell off during my modular era.

In recent years when I wanted to do wavetable stuff I usually turned to Vital, a free competitor that was a bit more modern and had some fresh ways to manipulate its wavetables. But that was really just a once-in-a-while thing.

There have been rumors of Serum 2 development for quite some time, but I guess part of me never thought it would see the light of day. However, it was released last night — and amazingly, a free upgrade for Serum owners. That license I bought used back in 2016 is really paying off now.

The major features that are new to Serum 2:

3 primary oscillators instead of two.
New wavetable banks, new filters, new FX, new warp modes.
Wavetables can interpolate instead of needing to morph in the editor.
New oscillator modes: multisample, sample, granular, spectral. All have nice factory content for each.
Oscillators and filters can be modulation sources. This alone is huge (and part of why there are three oscillators and some additional tuning modes for them now.) It also allows feedback modulation!
New routing/mixing options
New clip sequencer and arpeggiator
A whole lot of small changes/improvements. (Such as wider possible ranges and alternate modes for unison, which I love…)

In short, it’s dreamy. It’s not perfect — it will not drone without externally holding a MIDI note on message (even with the clip sequencer), and I’d still like to run MPE pressure through a slew limiter and other modular-ish tricks. But I could 100% make an album just using this (and some additional effects) and be happy, if I hadn’t already come up with a plan.

I have, finally, sold off all of the modules I was wanting to let go of. I still have Xaoc Tallin sitting in a drawer, because between it, Ana 2, and Legio — all 6HP — I’m not sure which two I want to keep. I haven’t done much with the Doepfer octal VCA since getting it (in between album projects) so I’m not sure what my VCA needs will really be. (I am mostly keeping Legio in case some killer must-have firmware is released for it, because I’m not really in love with any of the existing ones.)

Pretty much this.

A reasonable person would say: if the building has a Pizza Hut sign, the owner has a a Pizza Hut franchise, and the shop sells Pizza Hut brand pizza, it’s a Pizza Hut.

Transphobes would tell you: if it has this roof, it’s a Pizza Hut. The physical form of the building as it once was is its destiny forever.

They would tell you: even if that iconic roof was removed and replaced with a completely different design, it is still a Pizza Hut. Because that’s what it was “at birth.”

They would tell you: if a construction company started building a Pizza Hut, but then the plan changed before the roof was finished, and it ended up with a different shape: it’s a mutilated Pizza Hut.

They would tell you that if somebody opened a sub shop in a building that had this roof, it’s not really a sub shop, and it has an unfair competitive advantage over “real” sub shops.

If they saw a building that had a roof that looked kind of like Pizza Hut and kind of not, it would make them angry, because “science” says there are only two kinds of buildings: Pizza Hut and Not Pizza Hut.

They would even have a subculture of people who “hutvestigate” photos of buildings, measuring the roof angles to decide which buildings are secretly Pizza Hut. And they would do this even for cartoon images of buildings just to make sure the Woke Mind Virus isn’t infiltrating children’s media.

(And now it’s time for my lunch break and I kind of want pizza…)

stormy weather

On the weekend of March 14-16, 2025, a massive line of storms slowly crawled across the US, from Oklahoma toward the coast. Sustained straight-line winds were severe enough, whipping up wildfires and house fires and flipping tractor trailers over, but it also spawned dozens of tornadoes, and overall it killed at least 39 people.

Here in St. Louis, it knocked out power to 100,000 homes. There was no damage on our property (aside from having to throw away some food), and just a bit of siding torn off the church at the end of the street. An already sickly tree in my parents’ yard lost most of its limbs (luckily just falling where they were), and some kind of metal box on their roof has a few dings from hail. Within a few blocks of them though, there were huge trees down, and one house that was dramatically speared by a tornado-tossed tree. A tornado seems to have charged right up a nearby creek, overturning trees and destroying a few rooftops.

We’re definitely grateful to have been spared, but a weekend with no power is still a hassle. My parents’ generator certainly came in handy, and we mostly spent the weekend with them, making slow cooker Irish stew, cutting up some of the fallen tree, assembling some furniture. We played the board game Azul — which seems to be pretty neat, but it was the first time for all of us and we got some of the rules wrong, including scoring with three different methods that were all wrong 🙂 But going back home, no light, no internet, no heat (temps went from 82F pre-storm to 34F post-storm), no fan (which really helps me sleep), etc. was just not a lot of fun.

I still prefer power failure during cold weather over during hot weather. Our previous two major outages happened in early July and lasted four miserable days.

One of the things I did to pass the time was finish reading Chlorine. Written by a nonbinary author, it’s about a queer high school girl with a thing for mermaids, who is an excellent competitive swimmer under far too much pressure. Avoiding spoilers, I will just mention “multiple forms of abuse” and “body horror” and leave it at that. It was an excellent and enthralling novel, but not an easy or pleasant one.

I have to wonder to what extent the swim team’s suffering was actually typical of elite athletes (e.g. Olympic hopefuls), and to what extent it was exaggerated or unusual. But I imagine there is a lot of pushing bodies far beyond what is healthy — intense training, inadequate rest, ignoring injuries that shouldn’t be ignored, extreme diets, learning to ignore pain even when it’s giving important warnings. Possibly quite a lot of psychological harm as well. Certainly society is slowly acknowledging the risks of head injuries etc. in certain sports…. not that things seem to be changing much to fix it. This book, coming not long after Body Neutral, tells a pretty bleak story. Society idolizes athletes and models, but simultaneously acts as if strength/endurance/beauty/etc. are virtues while also taking them for granted.

moonblock

I’ve seen two total solar eclipses, but now I’ve seen one total lunar eclipse.

Lunar isn’t nearly as dramatic and awe-inspiring as solar, but it’s still very cool. At first it just looks like an ordinary crescent moon, if you haven’t been paying attention to the phase. But as totality draws nearer, you can see the rest of the moon in a dark rusty red. (How well and how soon you can see it probably depends on how much light pollution you’re dealing with, and your eyesight and corrective lenses…) I was expecting the bit of “highlight” around the top edge to flatten out within a few minutes into totality, but it still kind of looked like a three-dimensional, slightly rounded button or piece of candy.

My photos were not good. While the technical specs of the Pixel 8a camera are decent and the software is probably quite good at taking portraits of people, it’s really not the right tool for astronomy photos. (The Open Camera app was recommended to me, so I’ll check that out.) These were the best of a bad bunch:

(Some of what we’re seeing there is thin tree branches. Lights from other houses were quite bright, and I was trying to find a place to stand where they could be eclipsed by trees.)

I didn’t much care for Dawesome’s effect plugin LOVE when I tried it, but they’ve just released a wavetable distortion plugin called HATE.

Wavetable distortion isn’t super innovative in its own right, and is quite easy to do in Bitwig. For the most part it offers few advantages over more traditional distortion options, but there are some fun techniques with it. One of those techniques is to mix an LFO with your audio, phase-modulating the wavetable. Unfortunately, HATE not only has no internal modulation, it has a DC-blocking filter on the input so you can’t pre-mix it yourself.

What HATE does have going for it, aside from a few tools to manipulate the table to make it a little more distortion-friendly, is an effects chain similar to its MYTH and KULT synths. Especially at the intro price, this chain and its unique and handy set of effects makes it worthwhile.

This is somewhat marred by a really unfortunate UI choice. Each effect initially shows a comically wide wet/dry mix slider with fancy textured artwork (as ssen above) and a preset selector. If you click a tiny gear icon, it’ll show the actual controls except for the wet/dry mix — you have to bounce between those two pages to tweak the effect. It’s really obnoxious to work with, but not quite enough to kill the vibe because it can sound super cool.

I’ve found that the LSSN shave soap bar is WAY better than any foam, gel, cream or oil I have tried to shave with. I just rub it directly on and it forms a dense lather that stays where it should. Less it of it goes down the drain before I even pick up the razor than with anything from a can or tube. (It does require fairly hot water to re-melt the shea butter when rinsing off the razor.) I seem to get a smoother shave with it — although stubble is back the next afternoon anyway — and there is no irritating menthol (especially when I get a little up my nose or it runs into my eyes from shaving my head).

A lot of these bars make a big deal of the environmental friendliness of their minimal packaging, which is nice but I don’t feel like I go through so much shaving cream is that much of a big deal, no more often than I need to replace them. You should see the pile of insulin pens and pen needles that I have to throw away instead of recycling…. sigh.

On that subject of insulin, for the first time since I was diagnosed with diabetes, my blood glucose is officially “under control” (meaning not currently high enough to be toxic, not that I’m “cured”). Here it is for the past few years:

For years it stayed around 7.5. Very intense, unsustainable and depressing diet/exercise effort in the summer of 2011 only got it down to 7.1, along with temporary, very minor weight loss. And then my A1C shot up worse — I suspect, because one of the meds I was on at the time that forces increased insulin production had damaged my pancreas.

The turning point in 2022 was going on Ozempic, and then going to the max dose last year.

beware the Ideas of March

The bid we got from the first contractor was half of the other guy’s. We’re going with that. It leaves more room in the budget to fix the increasingly scary backyard deck.

I could, I have no doubt, demolish the deck myself. It would take some number of days, I would need frequent breaks (involving walking around to the front of the house and up the steps). And then I’d still have to hire someone to haul away the debris, build a fence and, and concrete steps up to the back door.

We’ve been in the habit of just opening the back door and letting the dogs do their business in the backyard. This is going to be an issue during the deck/stairs process; neither of them is that happy about leashes, especially the little guy. So the faster that job gets done, the less of a pain in the ass it will be for everyone involved.

Mark Zuckerberg (spits) wore a t-shirt recently that said “AUT ZUCK AUT NIHIL”, which was a play on “AUT CAESER AUT NIHIL” (Caesar or nothing). So Jay Graber, the CEO of BlueSky, responded with her own t-shirt in a similar style: “MUNDUS SINE CAESERIBUS” (a world without Caesars). Naturally it has gone viral and copycat shirts were available within hours.

I find this exchange especially amusing, given that a few days from now is the 2069th anniversary of Caesar getting stabbed 23 times by the senators who’d finally had enough of his shit. I am not a bloodthirsty person, I am a… let’s call it a pacifist tempered by practical considerations. But there are a handful of billionaires and politics whose ironic demise I could only celebrate.

Speaking of the march of ideas..

On And Yet… I got into a certain holding pattern with techniques and gear, and stuck tightly to it. That wound up meaning very few software synths and no bass guitar. Nothing wrong with that!

But for the next project, I’ve decided to adopt some creative constraints as a sort of game. Here are the rules:

Record tracks from start to end sequentially as they appear on the album, and have them transition into each other smoothly and continuously.
The album title must begin with an E (because I want to eventually fill in the alphabet)
The first and last notes of the album should be E. (As defined by A440 and 12TET; this doesn’t otherwise constraint tuning/scale.)
Odd-numbered tracks use only bass guitar for a sound source, processed and layered however I like. (Other oscillators are allowed for modulation purposes.)
Even-numbered tracks must begin with DecadeBridge Sn, and end with Arturia Easel V. Other sound sources are also permitted.

Seems like this should be pretty fun. 🙂

Reddit, or at least the cluster of nonbinary subreddits I follow, is really starting to lose its shine. I mean, I never really liked it as a platform, but it’s increasingly clear that it doesn’t really foster community, the way a forum or even Discord does. It was helpful to me for a brief while for a step on my journey, but it’s very quickly gotten less so. And it’s frustrating to try to stand against the endless tide and respond with helpful advice and encouragement.

I think this is why I was never into the idea of Twitter. Give me forums and proper blogs!

Sacred Gender continues to be quite good. One thought-provoking exercise was: describe your gender while avoiding words like masculine/feminine, male/female, man/woman, etc. The author says almost everyone has trouble with this and that nonbinary folks mainly tend to be weirdly poetic about it.

“Of borders” is the phrase that keeps coming to me. A rock, just off shore, jutting out from the waves, and the waves crashing over it. Tree roots spreading through soil, wood and earth interlaced and holding onto each other. Air blowing over a textured metal surface, vibrating it, droning.

(Counting Chinese elements, I see I have earth twice and no fire, despite the whole “star” thing and personally feeling more of an affinity for water and air. Hmm.)

Some people describe their gender as if it’s directly, almost literally related to something like outer space, forests, etc. That’s really not what I’m thinking with this imagery. But I think, having done the exercise, I understand that kind of thinking just a little bit better now.

Shaka, after the walls fell

I’ve been dealing with wall repair estimates…

The first one: the guy didn’t respond at all to his own web form. He did answer his phone right away and set up an appointment to look at it and make an estimate the next morning. But then he didn’t show, didn’t call and didn’t answer the voice mail I left.

The second one: responded to a Yelp estimate request in less than an hour, set up an appointment for the next afternoon. He said that the middle and top walls weren’t long for this world either and it made the most sense to replace it all in one fell swoop. Within a couple of days he had sent me the estimates for replacing the three walls, as well as a single tall wall (but we don’t like that idea as much as the tiers). And… ooof, pricey.

Then the first contractor sent me a text — he apologized but he’d gotten a really bad stomach bug that put him in the hospital, and he could come out today (Sunday!) to take a look. And I was impressed — not with technical stuff like the first guy explained, but with design ideas for improving things while also reducing the cost. And he was super enthusiastic about trees too, so I know he’ll take good care of the cherry tree that’s on the top tier. I look forward to seeing his estimate because I think it’s going to come in well below the other one.

About those albums I picked up on Bandcamp Friday:

Albums centered around the Buchla Music Easel tend to share certain things in common. This one is a bit unusual in its lushness; while there are absolutely some moments and some aspects that are very “Easel-ish” — the pings and beeps and bloops are not missing — there are also lush layers, and meta approaches to composition. It’s an Easel album that doesn’t come off as minimalist. Nice.

While writing this post I accidentally had started playing a track on the Bandcamp website as well the one I already had going in MusicBee, and… it worked 😉

This is ambient and experimental music written for the dance piece “Last Work” as well as some other recordings that the composer had made at that same time. Some of it involves cello and choral sounds, plucks and sampled instruments and noises, and some of it is more purely synthetic. Overall I feel like it’s deep. As if the composer had really studied the dance piece, absorbed it, and then reinterpreted it both musically and in visual art (the physical release comes with silkscreen prints), with some prototyping and experiments along the way. It’s the best kind of ambient music, where one can just put it on in the background and let it tease the subconscious, but can also listen more intently and find that it’s definitely not just mindless filler.

I find this release a bit odd, and not in the usual way that most of the music I like is odd. 🙂 At the start it’s really beautiful and immersive but not afraid to growl and howl. But by the time we’ve reached the end of the shortish album it’s moved through so many moods and aesthetics it makes one feel lost (as the title might suggest). There are moments of genuine funk, in what is otherwise an ambient work. It’s actually disorienting.

POB is the “Ambassador to the Stars” for Noise Engineering, and here he is with a live set at Buchla & Friends (a synth convention) with a mostly-NE Eurorack setup, doing live improvised techno with the sort of industrial flair you’d expect. Even if I didn’t know who POB was, I would hear this and think “wow, this person really likes Noise Engineering oscillators.” Lots of FM percussive voices sometimes pushed into noise, grindy wavefolding and distortion, big solid underlying bass drones, hard kicks, and delay/reverb gone a little bit mad. Yes.

Following that up with more badass industrial-flavored techno. A nonbinary DJ/producer and game developer from Chicago. I definitely need to pick up more of their stuff (listening to other albums, it goes well beyond techno).

Trovarsi is fairly well known in the modular synth world, for having founded (with Space Racer and Earth-626) the SoCal Synth Society and Frequency Shift (a streaming festival featuring female and nonbinary musicians), and working with Corry Banks’ ModBap Modular. She makes great techno and seems to be a neat person, though I only saw her in passing at Knobcon.

I don’t know if both literal and figurative meanings of “at sea” were intended in Moonminpapa At Sea (since the author was Finnish), but that feels right. Anyway, yes, he did continue to be kind of obnoxious, faking competence and confidence when both were increasingly shaky. His wife kind of just went along with things for the most part, but then also kind of disassociated, while also discovering her artistic talents. Their son fell madly in love with a seahorse (who in this world apparently is a magical horse (with four hooves, horseshoes etc.) that lives in the sea) who did not love him back or respect him at all, a very Faerie sort of vibe. There was quite a bit of supernatural oddity going on. I was really expecting the story to come to a point where everyone finally admits they really want to go back to Moominvalley and that none of them actually like the sea or wanted to move in the first place.

Eh.

I started reading Sacred Gender and it’s better than I had feared. The book is sort of dual purpose: affirming one’s gender through pagan practice, and making pagan groups/spaces more welcoming and inclusive for trans and nonbinary folks. So there’s a bit of a Trans/Nonbinary 101 guide at the start and it’s really well done.

A lot of binary trans people don’t quite seem to get nonbinary folks, but it’s very clear that the author does. One metaphor the author likes, which struck me: “a platypus is not a beaver-duck.” Nonbinary people are not (necessarily) an awkward masculine/feminine blend. It’s just that our culture is so fixated on its model of gender that, when trying to describe someone for whom that model fails, it’s still done in terms of the failing model. (I’ve seen people say the word “nonbinary” is a bit unfortunate because it tries to define us by what we are not, but it’s difficult to come up with another way of thinking about it.)

Another fun one: in a hypothetical society with 12 genders, if there are more than 12 people then someone probably doesn’t fit neatly within the gender 12-arity.

The next part talked about the flaws in Paganism (e.g. Wicca and Wicca-adjacent, 20th century white people Paganism — something I was never a part of but had read about and knew a few folks in it). A lot of its feminist emphasis grew from 60s-80s second wave feminism, aka TERFs. Gender esentialism was baked right in, with strict gendered roles based on reproductive biological functions. This of course is not very welcoming to trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming or even “regular” queer people, and honestly is more limiting to cis people than it should be. Aside from that, there was a lot of ahistorical gunk adopted as almost dogma, and precious little attention paid to non-white, indigenous and folk spiritual practices. The book points out it really does not have to be this way.

The next part is about ancestor veneration — something largely neglected in the aforementioned style of paganism, but almost universal in most indigenous practices and folk religion. Honestly, the chapter could almost have come right out of Kemetic Orthodoxy, so it was all very familiar. This is an area where I also have been a little too white, so to speak, but I’ve been getting nudges about getting better with it and this chapter was timely for me.

I look forward to the rest of the book, it’s been pleasantly good so far.

ketchup

It’s Bandcamp Friday, which I almost forgot. (This just means Bandcamp doesn’t take their usual percentage out of sales, so some people wait for this day to do their buying to maximize what artists get. Or in the case of And Yet…, maximizing what Lambda Legal will get.) I picked up a few things which I will review later.

I finished reading Body Neutral a few days ago. Or rather, I got most of the way through and stopped. I don’t actually have the sorts of body issues that the book addresses — dislike of some aspects of one’s body is totally normal!

The book is about people whose subconscious minds have created these body image issues as a response to trauma, abuse, fear etc. The author says that after years of treating people they found almost all their patients match with one or more of four “avatars” — ways that the subconscious views the body as the cause and/or solution of a problem.

Still, reading the book did have me considering my own thoughts about my body, and also some struggles I’ve had in the past (e.g. when I was a kid and paranoid about other kids bullying me) and how I dealt with them (mostly poorly). It was worth the read. I’ll keep those personal details to myself though.

In other books, Tales from Moominvalley worked better than some of the other books because each chapter was a little self-contained short story that primarily featured a specific character. Many of these characters are really quite neurotic, and the stories much more melancholy than you’d see in typical American children’s stories, but some of them are great in a sort of uniquely gothy emo way.

I am really not liking Moominpapa in Moominpapa At Sea though. He’s having a sort of crisis about his usefulness (or lack thereof) as a masculine protector figure, when things are generally fine and his family is capable of taking care of themselves. He ends up hauling the whole family on an adventure that they don’t seem to be particularly into (but they’re also not objecting, which… I think is bothering me more). Maybe things will shift a bit as the story continues, but so far it’s a bit ugh.

The “Tendan Old Temple Meiko Spicy Sandalwood Incense” is absolutely not the same as the old “Tendan Sandalwood” that I liked so much. It’s not unpleasant, but it smells kind of like… baby powder? I think the problem is the benzoin is stronger than the sandalwood and cinnamon (I don’t know what spikenard smells like). Anyway, it’s the wrong vibe. Maybe for general “make your house smell nice” purposes it’s okay.

The Kobunboku incense by Baiedo is also not particularly my jam. It’s apparently super popular but there are about a dozen different Nippon Kodo incense options that I like more. Ah well.

Speaking of things that smell nice, I have an order of soap and stuff from Native on the way. They kept getting recommended wherever I’d see people asking about gender-neutral soap. The body wash is actually a tie-in with Jarritos Mexican soda, and is watermelon scented. Hey, it makes as much sense as the “Stone” scented body wash I’m currently using.

A few weeks ago one of my donations was to an organization called Private Citizen. I now regret this.

While some of what they were talking about at that particular moment resonated with me… they have an awful lot of conservative buzzwords on their website. I get the feeling their idea of “government overreach” does not include any of the authoritarian, unconstitutional, unauthorized shit Trump has been up to.

They have something called the “Pardon Project” but their success stories are three people who were pardoned by Trump’s first administration — there is zero mention of anyone Biden pardoned, including Leonard Peltier, nor of the frankly embarrassing pardons that Trump handed out to the Jan 6 insurrectionists this time around. And looking at their board of directors: yep, they are conservatives. Well. Poop.

I have opinions.

I do not care about sports very much. But when supposed progressives like Gavin Newsom declare their opposition to trans people in sports… that’s not really about sports, nor is it about fairness or protecting women.

It’s a wedge, a slippery slope. If you claim that a trans woman isn’t a woman, in the specific context of sports, it’s not many steps from there to the Texan attempt to pass a law declaring that all trans people are inherently committing fraud with their bodies and identities at all times. (This has no chance of passing, but it does reveal the thought process behind transphobia and politician’s open willingness to attack trans rights.)

Everyone seems to assume that trans women have a huge advantage over AFAB women in basically every single sport. (I’m not going to say “biological women” because if you have been taking female hormones for several years, and it’s changed your body, it should be self-evident that this is biological.) There is no science or statistics that actually bears this out.

Testosterone during puberty does affect things such as hand size and other factors. Someone who completes puberty and then transitions, will be physiologically different — on average — than someone who transitions first, or a cisgender person. Going on E doesn’t shrink what has already grown. But yes, let’s look at hand size here; assume we’re talking about a sport where that matters (perhaps basketball). Here are the issues:

All trans women are being discriminated against in the same way here: those who have socially transitioned and aren’t on hormones at all; those who transitioned later after puberty, and those who transitioned before puberty.
Average hand sizes vary more with ethnicity than with gender. An average Filipino’s hand is 41% larger than an average Bangladeshi man’s hand. But within each ethnicity the average man’s hand is only 20% larger than the average woman’s. Would you support banning Filipino, Czech, Iranian, Jordanian, Turkish, and German cis women from womens’ basketball because of their unfair advantage…?
If the unfair advantage comes from hand size, why is biological sex at birth the criteria instead of actual hand size?
Testosterone levels (in both cis males and cis females) also vary a lot… and vary a lot by ethnicity. A lot of accusations against cis women with high T as “actually men” have been quite racist.

Hormone replacement therapy does change aerobic capacity, body composition, muscular strength and endurance. How much it changes them varies on a case-by-case basis.

Studies of military fitness tests have shown that in many respects, trans women perform more like cis women than cis men, and trans men perform more like cis men than cis women. Trans women did generally have faster 1.5 mile run times than cis women — but worse than cis men — and trans women were worse at vertical jump height, pushups, and aerobic capacity than cis women. (These were not long-term studies and some portions of the studies had fewer participants than one would ideally want, but still.) There’s also Lia Thomas, who was a star swimmer… whose times got 15 seconds worse within a year or two of transitioning.

In terms of sports statistics? There are no credible statistics claiming trans women have an advantage in sports. The Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport released a report saying as much. There are really very few trans athletes (one piece of data I saw said “less than 20 in international competition” and another claimed “0.04% of female athletes are trans women”). A group whose sole purpose is advocating anti-trans sports bans could only find five trans kids in K-12 sports in the entire nation. The NCAA says there are only ten trans athletes in college sports. Their presence has done nothing to disrupt opportunities for cis women to excel. In fact… in states that have anti-trans sports laws, there are fewer cis kids participating in sports.

It is well-known that most people who vehemently oppose trans women in women’s sports don‘t actually support women’s sports in the first place. Not as participants, not as parents, not as supporters of equal pay, not as supporters of racial justice in women’s sports, not as supporters of preventing actual harassment in women’s sports. In fact many of them advocate for humiliating tests to be carried out on all women in sports to prove they’re not trans.

Youth sports are not about performance, they’re about socialization and well-being. The American Medical Association says that the only effect of banning trans kids from sports is harming trans kids’ mental health.