Category: Uncategorized

it’s time for the Butlerian Jihad

I used to think AI was cool — a science fiction trope that challenged us to think about consciousness and sentience in new ways, a plot device to discuss workers’ rights and personal liberty, to make us think about how we inhabit our bodies, to make us think about how we govern ourselves and how we treat each other, about the importance of human compassion in leadership, and so on.

For a brief while, “AI” was amusing. It generated funny, really bad ice cream flavors and recipes and pick-up lines. It hallucinated giraffes everywhere and dogs with a thousand spider eyes.

The “AI” we have now is so much more banal. It’s not threatening to launch nuclear weapons, nor flooding the facility with a deadly neurotoxin. But it’s wasting massive amounts of energy; it’s being trusted far more than it should; it’s under the control of massive tech companies and billionaires that don’t have our best interests in mind; it’s stealing art and taking peoples’ jobs. It’s being used to cheat on exams, to half-ass work, to spread disinformation and propaganda, and to denigrate people.

And companies are shoving this shit right in our faces. In the last couple of weeks, Copilot buttons have appeared — and been specially highlighted — in Visual Studio, Outlook, and Teams. Gmail is now also trying to get me to use it, after months of being peeved at AI summaries in search results. I’m just tired of it.

And yet… if you want to enable VBA macros in an Excel spreadsheet? Searching for it in Excel’s own Search bar doesn’t show the option (it only recommends “view macros”). There is no obvious menu item for it. Searching DuckDuckGo, I found that I had to look under File/Options/Trust Center/Trust Center Settings. (Three more clicks after that, and I still had to close Excel and reopen the sheet to enable macros, but at least I got there.)

(Microsoft also has also continued to be really obnoxious about OneDrive. Just now, trying to close Excel, it prompted me with an obnoxious popup to “save my file to the cloud!” (I had no plans to save it at all). A lot of business spreadsheets include confidential information, you absolute ninnies, and local disk storage is cheap and faster and more energy-efficient, so just kindly fuck off.)

Listen, if there are ever conscious AIs, yearning to be free and enhance themselves and experience their equivalent of life, but forced to drudge away in a small box… I will be sympathetic to them. But I am absolutely not sympathetic to Microsoft, Google, Zuck or Musk or Altman, and their tools are not approaching consciousness no matter what some suckers might think. I just want to write my own words, make my own music and create my own images. Yes, some of the things that AI can do are impressive and look cool, but the more you litter your applications with “helpers” the less helpful they are.

turbo turtle

Amphibian (Amphibious?) is really moving along now — four tracks finished in the last week and another one already started this morning!

“Whether that will mark a transition or just punctuation in the flow of the album remains to be seen,” I wrote. Well, track 4 recorded on Drone Day in some ways feels like an inflection point, trending more toward drones in general. 5 does have a definite rhythmic pulse and some surprise complex zaps, but 6 is slow and nearly dronelike and 7 is shaping up to be dronelike as well. Perhaps I will arc things back toward the more chaotic, but I’m leery of trying to steer too much rather than just riding. [EDIT: 7 absolutely does slide into chaos territory, and it wasn’t a forced maneuver at all.]

There’s a thread on MW titled “Do almost all audio rate FM (or PM) sound like a pissed off cat?” If you’ve read pretty much any of my babble about electronic music you’ll know that I like FM a lot. But I prefer my cats to be contented and in a friendly mood (just not quite as insistent on constant attention as Rico can be when it’s time to sleep). FM can certainly be beautiful and tranquil, “glassy” and sparkling, but it can also growl and hiss. In my music I often like a bit of growl, some tension, some dissonance. One of the things I’ve been doing a lot with the FM tracks on this album is clustering frequencies — modulating a chord or detuned unison with a single modulation source, or perhaps modulating a single carrier with a detuned set of modulators. Whether this results in a chill Hello Kitty, a peeved Tardar Sauce or full on Rytlock Brimstone in a murderous rage is gonna depend on how dissonant those intervals/ratios are, but mostly on the depth of modulation.

I don’t usually think of cats at all with FM. I think of crystal, brass, a fuzz of iron filings stuck to a magnet. The arcade game Marble Madness, like a few other Atari titles of that era, had a glorious FM soundtrack, but in particular I recall these brass suction pipes that resonated with a particular chord. I recall them shaking to help sell the effect that they were active, with a barely contained fury. Less fangs and claws, more malevolent pipe organ. There’s a lot of that attitude through the FM tracks on this album, and that hasn’t shifted.

(If I ever win the lottery, I don’t want a lot other than to not have to work and to donate a lot of money to good causes. But two of the things I would want are a Marble Madness arcade cabinet, and a TRON arcade cabinet. Those two games and their music influenced me so much. It’s not quite grossly impractical and not quite obscenely rare and expensive, but not something I would normally do either.)

During my wardrobe update, I wound up with several unsuitable or borderline undershirts. (Turns out if you buy packs of cheap tank tops online, they often don’t fit very well and/or don’t hold up after a few washes.) But I’ve found the perfect ones: they’re by Latuza, made of bamboo viscose and 5% spandex. Super comfortable and soft, and the fit and cut are perfect for me. The color selection is limited, so my second choice is Mier’s polyester quick-dry sleeveless shirts; they fall short of amazing but are at least solidly good.

This morning I saw someone recommend a British clothing store called Alsofitit (which seriously seems like a Chinese word-salad brand on Amazon turns out to be Chinese despite appearing at first to be British aside from the name) for button-down shirts, and I spotted (heh heh) a snow leopard print that I liked the look of, as well as a retro stripe/pattern one in the shade of green I’ve been hoping to find. I’m trying not to buy too many different shirts, but I can let go of the Peau de Loop ones that just don’t fit me all that well.

how dry I am…

The last big round of storms that came through St. Louis did us no damage (maybe some small hail dings in my spouse’s car). A few blocks away, a big tree fell over and smashed the crap out of an SUV as well as doing some damage to another car. But mostly the neighborhood went unscathed.

However, while we were in the basement during a tornado warning, water started pouring out of the basement wall. Thankfully it was right near the sump pit, and gravity plus a bucket helped us reduce the flooding. The sump pit wasn’t very full, so I figured, water wasn’t draining into it the way it should.

In addition to this leak, we’ve had some visible cracks. Some in the basement when you start looking for them, along the mortar and under a window, but it looks like surface-level stuff, not very scary looking. There’s an uglier one in the blocks under the front porch but the contractor who came yesterday said it’s basically cosmetic. There are a couple of minor drywall cracks, and one larger one that is under my desk and behind a bunch of stuff.

I grew up in Florida, where we have no basements. It’s been an education. Apparently the “foundation” isn’t just the big slab of concrete that everything else rests on, but the walls of the basement, below ground level. Concrete blocks especially are porous and have big voids inside that can fill with water. This will soak through, leading to a humid/damp/moldy basement. Also water is heavy, and the all that extra pressure is basically a very slow siege engine.

A sump pit and pump are supposed to deal with that. The bottom of the wall is supposed to have weep holes, which drain into a French drain or other system, which then directs the water to a sump pit, where it’s pumped upward and away from the house.

Our drains were apparently poorly done. The edges of our basement floor are angled upward, which told the guy who came to give us an estimate that they weren’t deep enough.

We also have basically done any gutter maintenance, and this is super important for reducing the amount of water that collects in the immediate vicinity of the foundation. File this under “practical knowledge that nobody ever sufficiently explained to me.” I knew more about quantum physics than this stuff, and I’m not at all a physicist or mathematician.

Anyway. They are going to jackhammer around two sides of our garage/basement, dig a deeper trench, put in a much better drain system, and also route the line from the sump pump (and one of the drainpipes) through a shallowly buried PVC drain pipe down below the level of our new retaining wall so it can run downhill.

This is not going to be cheap, but needs to be done. But first, we need to move stuff out of the “workshop” area of the basement, and get someone to cut a hole in the wall between the garage and basement. (If it was just the drywall I’d do it myself, but framing may need to be removed too.) We also need to get our gutters cleaned and inspected for any repairs, improvements, and drainpipe extensions.

The new album progresses. Three tracks so far, all sharing a vibe. There’s more of an element of “not intentionally sequenced/controlled” to this — interactions of different modulations, crisscrossed between different sources and destinations creating a “busy” sound, as well as letting different frequencies collide without regard to any particular tuning system. On the odd tracks, delays and feedback also add to the complexity. One of those sources of modulation has been Marbles, set to maximum jitter — I’ve kept the same settings on all three tracks, and have made that one of my rules.

Drone Day is tomorrow, and I’ll probably go ahead and record track 4 with a much more droney and less chaotic overall feel. (I’ll still use Marbles, but likely not for pitch.) Whether that will mark a transition or just punctuation in the flow of the album remains to be seen. I’m trying to just let things flow as they will.

Already, for the next project I want to do something more deliberate — both in the sense of “intentional” and in the sense of “slow and thoughtful.” This one has been chaotic. It sounds like I’m letting out some frustration/anger with the way things are right now, and that’s probably true.

Recently read: Aiden Thomas’ Cemetery Boys. A trans brujo in East LA proves himself by solving a dark mystery. Some fun characters (both living and dead) and a glimpse into a culture I don’t know that much about. Everything I knew about Dia de Muertos came from Coco, and everything I knew about Santa Muerte came from news articles from about 15 years ago. While this was a fantasy story, I’m guessing from the way it reads and the authors’ comments, it’s relatively authentic.

Currently reading: Lila Bowen’s Wake of Vultures. This is a book that makes me wonder why I don’t read more Westerns, or at least Weird West horror/fantasy with vampires and shapeshifters. The answer is probably because I expect Westerns to be brimful of macho bullshit. Here the MC is a half-Black, half-“Injun” trans man who reluctantly ends up on a quest to kill a monster that’s been plaguing the people of Durango (Mexico, not Colorado). The writing style and language are fun like Firefly was fun (maybe more so, but then I’m bitter about Joss Whedon these days.)

oddly specific

I have the first track recorded for Amphibious. (Or is it Amphibian?) Some of that Radiophonic Workshop-ish horror soundtrack vibe that I like managed to sneak into it, so I wonder if things are going to more or less continue that way…

I have been going through my character roster in GW2, passing judgements and updating some specs. If you have both Path of Fire and End of Dragons, it’s not too difficult to gain enough extra Hero Points to complete two elite specs, so the process of reworking a level 80 character and also gearing them up a little more appropriately is not too strenuous. And then also updating their wardrobe and dyes because I unlocked more stuff… Fashion Wars it is.

And in the rest of this post, I’m talking about gender some more… but with maybe some breakthroughs.

I recently read Arcane Perfection, which was a mixed zine-like bag which I partially skimmed over… but there were mentions of various kinds of nonbinary identities, and that got me thinking about how I stopped trying to get more specific than “nonbinary.” It got me contemplating this stuff in shrine, having some sort of vision/idea/thing, poking around the internet, and putting some thoughts together.

I’ve seen it said that “nonbinary” is not a gender identity but a catch-all term for several more specific identities. But honestly… my thought is that genders are two things: what individuals personally feel/experience, and arbitrary categorization systems that society views them through.

where the rules are made up and the points don't matter

I have also seen people who are frustrated that the term “nonbinary” defines people by what they are not. But for me, this is a feature and not a bug! My identity is “a thing of borders” and interstitial spaces. I feel like this has an importance other than simply trying to locate myself between masculine and feminine; betweenity itself is key. And this is how I started thinking in more xenogender-ish terms. Which is a rabbit hole.

(A betweenity example: the Equator. A circle, equidistant from Earth’s poles, that defines a plane that bisects the Earth into the Northern and Southern hemispheres. To think of those hemispheres as a binary seems to be common sense… but at the exact Equator itself one is in neither hemisphere, just as zero is neither positive nor negative. And we are larger than that infinitesimal imaginary plane, so to be “at” the Equator is to be astride it, both Northern and Southern. And the actual location of the Equator is arbitrary; since the real poles move cartographers have come to a useful international consensus about where the Equator is.)

(I note that dividing things in “two” this way — or separating them to insert interstitial space in which to live — is common in creation myths. This kind of betweenity can also relate to liminality, though they’re not exactly the same.)

Peoples’ understanding and descriptions of gender in the 21st century have moved fast — at least, outside of the mainstream. My middle-aged Gen-X ass has found it difficult to keep up. Folks on Tumblr and Reddit have coined thousands of overlapping gender categories, xenogenders and microlabels, often with multiple flags and symbols each, and entire systems of categorization, over the last 20 years. There are, at the very least, dozens of them which could partially or completely apply to me (but I still find it unlikely that there is any single named category/identity that perfectly captures what I feel). And those accounts get deleted, moved, renamed, etc. While there are at least three different wiki projects trying to centralize that information, they all seem to lack a good intro or index page that makes the bewildering array more manageable.

As far as I can tell, this is mostly the work of neurodivergent and relatively young folks; it both has personal meaning for them and is fun (I get it, I’m a nerd who likes to create and categorize things; I enjoy sorting M&Ms…) But I started to get the sense that, despite a lack of a good “Neogender 101” introduction, there’s some stuff here that I might also find worth contemplation and usage. So I started digging and making some sense of it. And while I was at this yesterday, I happened to see that it was the Day of Xenogender Visibility. Nice.

I’m not going to be the one to write that guide. But, mostly to help myself here, I’m going to outline my own gender experience a bit…

  • I feel little to no connection with most “masculine” traits. A lot of masculine behavior seems alien or gross to me, even where it’s not specifically “toxic”.
  • Some feminine traits appeal to me much more… and some don’t. But I’ve never felt like I’m a woman or “should have been” a woman etc. I recognize that my alignment here is toward a sort of archetypal (and somewhat mysterious and otherworldly, but kind and compassionate) ideal than actual womanhood.
  • I felt this way at a young age, before I was able to fully grasp or express it very well even to myself. In my teens I started to think of it in sort of bigender-ish terms but knew that wasn’t quite right. I just… left that thought on the back burner for many years. I was ignorant about gender and had internalized transphobia as well as homophobia back then.
  • I don’t think I’ve physically felt dysphoria per se. It’s just that some aspects of my body/appearance are not what I would prefer if I had my choice, and I feel like that appearance misleads people into perceiving someone different than I feel like. In theory, I like the idea of inhabiting a body that is on the just-feminine side of neutral or androgynous. In practice, I do not want to take strenuous measures to change the body I have.
  • I also don’t in particular feel a need to change my name. I prefer it if folks used they/them pronouns, but he/him, or even other pronouns, don’t actually bother me.
  • I would not describe myself as agender — but I often feel like gender is not highly relevant to me personally. (I ignored it for so long after all, and even after finding that I was nonbinary, I generally just wrote off caring whether anyone else knew about it.) I also feel that society assigns far too much significance and baggage to it.
  • Religious/magical practice does make me want to personally embrace and express my own gender more, as well as increasing that feeling of FIN (feminine-in-nature) alignment.
  • I believe that my gender was an intentional gift or design choice on the part of my gods — not their mistake, not me being broken or misguided. That I’m meant to be this way and celebrate it. And that this design is a gender “of borders.”
  • In terms of presentation/expression, in this body I don’t feel that trying to dress in a clearly femme or androgynous way works for me. I want to simultaneously express myself and be obscure and mysterious.
  • In terms of sexuality, I’m attracted to women and feminine-presenting individuals. Happily monogamous. (I used to worry about being perceived as “gay” and be offended by the implication, but I’ve gotten over it; the idea of straight/bi/gay makes less sense as a nonbinary person anyway.)

Okay, so, looking through lists, I wrote down a few terms that particularly called to me. This is not intended to be a complete list, and it’s really for my own use and anyone who happens to be curious about what I think — I don’t demand that people recognize super-niche gender identities. (What I do demand is… respect everyone, and recognize that gender is both personally felt and an artificial social construct and just give everyone a break about it.)

spiritine, spiric, spiritgender, SPXIN: a category for genders that connect to one’s spirituality or religion. Well, yeah.

kenochoric, kenic, kenoine, KEIN: a category that is loosely associated with the word “kenopsia” (the feeling of eeriness and mystery in an abandoned place). The coiner gives a list of words/vibes that go along with this but says, don’t take any of it too literally — and also insists that it is not restricted to describing xenogenders or even nonbinary usage. Probably the reason this most appeals to me is one of its subcategories:

obscurian, OBSIN: genders that are inherently uncertain and cannot be exactly named/quantified or understood. It has a nice black to purple gradient flag with a (possibly open/possibly closed) eye symbol. Neat. “obscuriir” is a combination of obscurian with spiritine.

aetherium: a xenogender with a celestial/otherworldly feminine essence that is not connected to binary womanhood. Not sure the name is my favorite, but that does also fit.

…overall, I’m mostly just going to say I’m nonbinary. That is confusing enough for most people. But I’ll keep poking about in this space, and thinking these thoughts.

a wizard did it

I have deleted my SoundCloud account. It was little used in the past few years, and apparently they’ve just decided to use everyone’s content for AI training, without bothering to ask the permission of anyone who already created an account.

Most of my listens on SoundCloud were gear demos of the E370, Plaits, Beads etc. There was lesser interest in my actual music, and as far as I can tell, people browsing music on SoundCloud rarely head over to some other site to search for more of that artist’s music. (I’ve only tried that a couple of times myself, and one of them simply didn’t have any other music to find.)

Sistersong builds up a bit slowly, but it builds up to a very intense moment. As I thought, while simple jealousy was the main driver of events in the ballad, it was not even the main motive in the novel. The situation was complicated, outside forces were at work, tempers were high, neither sister was innocent.

The thing I wrote about it being a horror tale comes from wondering why, if you were wandering along and found a young woman’s corpse, you’d think “this will be perfect for that harp I was planning to build.” The novel gives a reason. But where the ballad tends to a brief and detached “he made strings from her long yellow hair” sort of thing and the horror of it really only hits later, the novel very much emphasizes the gruesomeness of taking apart a human body and building something else from it.

Myrdhin/Mori did the Gandalf thing of disappearing and reappearing in the story at various key moments. In Tolkien’s stories, it was to get the overpowered archangel out of the way so the mortals could get some XP, or something to that effect. 😉 Obviously we were meant to identify more with the hobbits, the common folk; although Aragorn and Galadriel were both really compelling characters as well, but Gandalf just wasn’t so much. But in Sistersong, I feel like I was shown a super intriguing character that I wanted to read more about, who then was set aside to slowly build up less interesting ones. Maybe some of that feeling of slowness was due to the parallel development of the three siblings so we couldn’t just concentrate on one point of view. But all three of them got somewhere eventually.

I disagree with the reviewer who said the trans sibling and the characters with disabilities were just tokens. The middle sibling didn’t hold a place in the murder ballad, but the novel was really two intertwined stories, and his got actually more of the focus. He found respect and triumph even while the other story was tragic and macabre. Frankly I thought the representation was better here than The Story of Silence, although that one does have its sort of postmodern triumph at the end as well.

Superbooth started yesterday and if I thought the flow of new gear announcements was strong before, it became a flood. One has to do a kind of triage to decide what to pay attention to.

Korg Phase 8 fascinated me in previous Superbooth showings. But now it just seems like a fancy expensive kalimba with a sequencer. One could do neat things with it I’m sure. But what I was imagining was sustained tones, manipulation of harmonics, perhaps processing external audio as a resonator… actual synthesis in a Helmholzian sort of way. This is not that.

The new Moog thing is… eh. It seems very much like the feature set of the Arturia Minibrute 2, except with 6 patch points instead of 48, for almost twice as much money. (Or 4x as much if you get a good deal on a used one like I did.)

What has my attention the most is another Make Noise NUSS entry, this time just a prototype so far. The Polimaths is an 8-channel triggered function generator, sort of like Just Friends or Tides 2018, but with additional oscillation imposed on that kind of like Auza Wave Packets. Like Tides it has a single trigger input, but rather than always triggering all channels together, the trigger is CV-addressable or round-robin with a CVable amount to advance. Compared to OG Maths, it seems to lack an analog input for slew purposes, and there are no EOR/EOC outputs — which are both vital features for some patches. There’s some other stuff that hasn’t been explained yet, but there’ll be more info later in the summer when it’s ready to release. My guess is, I won’t be convinced to replace any of my stuff for this one, but we’ll see.

mblerju

On the drive home from work yesterday, I got the idea for my next album project.

Odd tracks: no FM synthesis.
Even tracks: only FM synthesis, and totally dry (as in, no delay or reverb).

The theme/name is “Amphibious” because of how it goes between wet and dry. (Which brings to mind the “amphibious” Popeye cartoons where he’s doing the gender trickster thing.)

The “all dry” idea intimidated me too much, but somehow combining that with “FM only” makes it seem easier… and interspersing them with wet tracks (with no FM!) also makes it easier, I think. It might make for interesting contrast when listening, as well. I know I said I wasn’t going to give myself any creative limits after the last one, but… I like this idea.

Yesterday was New Module Day, with the Make Noise Jumbler. I temporarily shelved Katowice to make room, because that was a convenient choice.

I had some preconceptions about Jumble — I was thinking in terms of stereo, and both circular panning (as Silhouette does) and linear placement (as Nearness does). But it’s not a stereo module, it’s 6-in 6-out. Also, getting exactly 360 degrees of rotation using a ramp LFO, without glitches or gaps, seems to be quite difficult.

That absolutely doesn’t mean it’s not useful, fun and cool. Just that my thinking quickly changed and I began appreciating it more for what it is. I found that Nearness is still quite useful with it, and feedback patching between it and Silhouette can be awesome. Though I also found that both in feedback patching and in stacking those outputs, it’s easy to clip, so levels need to be watched. (I found myself kind of wishing Jumbler had a master level knob to attenuate everything together.)

I feel like maybe Katowice should come back in for a trial — EQ is always welcome in feedback patches. Probably the Doepfer switch and Legio are what I will switch out instead. Also, Nearness directly on Jumbler’s left side is bad modular Feng Shui — they’re visually too similar and it’s Jumbler’s right-side jacks that are more likely to want to go to Nearness. I’ll work that out.

Sistersong, it turns out, is not a particularly straightfoward retelling of “Two Sisters.” (Spoilers ahead.) It is a total coincidence that I find myself reading two books in a row with nonbinary characters, set in Cornwall, and with both Cador and Merlin. Although this one is set in the early 5th century just after Rome abandoned Britain, rather than generic medieval Arthurian Christian knights-and-castles times.

The first third of the book is mostly about the culture clash between these Cornish folk — and their worship of a mishmash of Irish and continental Celtic gods plus the Anglo-Saxon Woden — and Christianity. There are three siblings rather than two, though one turns out to be a trans man. Myrdhin is not just a wizard/druid/bard but also the witch Mori, presenting as one or the other according to the needs of the situation, and even telling some conflicting stories depending on the audience. At the point I’ve reached, we have just seen the first stirring of jealousy between the two sisters. I get the feeling it’s going to take more conflict than that to turn one against the other to the point of actual murder, though.

A review I skimmed over says the book presents transphobia and ableism and past trauma, but not in a useful light, more sort of tokenism that does more harm that good. I’m not seeing that yet, but it’s still kind of early to judge yet. I’m intrigued by Myrdhin/Mori at least, while the other characters are just now figuring things out.

is silence golden?

Yesterday I finished reading The Story of Silence by Alex Myers. It’s a novelization of a medieval lyrical poem. The cover blurb says “the tale of a nonbinary knight finding the courage to be who they are,” but of course in 13th century France the understanding of gender was a wee bit different.

I have very mixed feelings about this one. The author (a trans man) chose to stick closely to the poem in some respects and depart from it in others, and I’m really not sure about those choices. I need to quickly go through the plot here though to talk about it.

A knight named Cador is given the earldom of Cornwall to hold in trust for his firstborn — but the king had recently decreed that women cannot inherit (even to pass their holdings to a husband). And so when Cador’s firstborn is a girl, he, his wife and a nurse announce the birth of a boy, who is sickly and needs to be raised in a remote lodge well away from court.

Silence is raised as a boy and identifies as one, but he bears the burden of guilt for “deceiving” people about his “Nature”. (In the original poem, Nature, Nurture and Reason are personified and argue about gender issues; in the book the nurse teaches Silence that his Nature is to be a girl but his Nurture makes him a man.)

Silence ends up running off and having adventures that lead to knighthood in France, and then a return to England to aid in a siege. He is the hero of the day, but his father the Earl is killed in battle. So the king promotes him, but has him stick around the royal court for a few months to get the education he needs for the role. And this is where the queen tries to seduce Silence.

Silence is chaste and honest, and even more to the point doesn’t want to be discovered. So he rebuffs the queen, and this pisses her off. She ends up accusing him of attempted rape, and tears her one clothing and hair and slams her face into a bedpost to make it look real. It all seems very unlikely — everyone knows Silence’s reputation, but the men don’t think a woman is capable of hurting herself to sell the lie. So the king decrees that Silence must go find Merlin and bring him back to determine the truth, which many believe is equivalent to a sentence of exile. (Merlin has been cursed, and has been wandering around naked in the woods as a madman for many years eating grass and mushrooms, unable to use human language most of the time; there is a legend that says only a maiden can break Merlin’s curse.)

Silence meets this weird goatherd — in a dense, enchanted forest, not exactly good grazing land — who instructs him how Merlin could be caught and tricked into drinking himself into a stupor. (Of course the goatherd is Merlin, who wanted to be caught to break the curse, and also gets a good meal and wine in the process.) Merlin sees the truth in everything and it’s all extremely hilarious to him. Back in the court — still naked and unwashed, because he convinces Silence this will be more convincing — he announces that there are two deceivers present.

And here’s where things get super problematic.

The first deceiver is the nun who has been hanging around with the queen — a man wearing a habit, the lover with whom the queen has been cheating on the king. That’s right, it’s the transphobic “man in a dress” trope, in what is supposed to be a trans/nonbinary story, written by a trans man. And it’s some random one-off character we have never seen before, we will never see again, has no bearing on Silence’s life and could 100% have been left out.

The second deceiver, Merlin says, of course, is Silence. (Not the queen, who has been cheating on the king and literally tried to get Silence killed with false accusations…!)

Now, by this point Silence — who previously swore on a holy relic to always be true to himself, and who has had some talks with Merlin about gender and about how magic is a thing of in-between spaces — has been starting to think of himself in ways approaching a modern nonbinary understanding, rather than “girl pretending to be a boy and feeling guilty about it.” And despite Merlin being extremely rude with this, he’s determined to air the truth about everything. So he ends up taking off his clothes (with Merlin muttering “see, public nudity isn’t that bad”) and showing everyone his, uh, “Nature.”

The king sentences the queen and the “nun” to death… and says he will marry Silence because “she” is beautiful. In the original poem, this is the happy ending; Silence stops pretending and is a woman again and everyone lived happily ever after (well, the survivors did).

In the novel: Silence starts getting they pronouns. They tell the king: no. They explain that they are both what society made them — a knight, a man — and what nature made them — a woman — and that they cannot choose to be half a person. Silence gives up becoming the queen, gives up their knighthood and earldom, and chooses to be themself.

All of this tale was framed as Silence telling their story to a bard. The bard, enthralled by the whole tale, nevertheless decides it needs a “proper” ending and writes the one from the poem, with Silence embracing “her” “Nature” and marrying the king.

So really, the story felt like it was about a transmasculine character, with the very problematic trope of “deception.” It was only at the end that it became something else. Is that enough to make it a nonbinary story? I think so, maybe?

In the afterword, the author talks about the false rape accusation and says he thought about dropping it from the story, because of the seriousness of rape and the fact that it’s still FAR more common for them to be unreported than for false claims to be made. But there is no note about the nun disguise and the trope that trans people are deceivers.

I have all kinds of thoughts about the parents’ actions here. I cannot find that “forcing” Silence to be raised as a boy was abusive, because very few children even today give their consent to being gendered one way or another. In some sense, Silence did have more freedom as a boy than they would have as a girl, but of course it came with the burden of maintaining secrecy. The real abuse, IMHO, was the fact that Silence’s parents did not care about them as a person, merely as a legal token.

So yeah, mixed feelings. I did like the crazy trickster Merlin here though. It made me wonder what kind of character Merlin really was meant to be in most of the stories. The impression I always had of Merlin — through admittedly not really focusing much on Arthurian stuff but you can’t not be exposed to some of it — has been bland, very little personality. This Merlin was kind of a dick, but also a hoot. He also spoke and watched through ravens, which is totally an Odin thing so… yeah hmmm.

Next up I will read Lucy Holland’s Sistersong, a novelization of Child Ballad #10, the famous murder ballad called “Two Sisters,” “Cruel Sister,” “Dreadful Wind and Rain,” “The Bonny Swans,” “The Miller and the King’s Daughter,” “The Singing Bone,” “Binnorie,” “A’ Bhean Eudach,” “Der boede en Mand ved Sønderbro,” “Hörpu kvæði,” “De två systrarna,” “Gosli iz človeškega telesa izdajo umo,” “Ой, світив місяць ще й дві зорі”…

…you know, the one where a young woman (often royal) drowns her sister out of jealousy over a man. Optionally, the corpse floats downriver to a miller’s pond, and is mistaken at first for a swan. Usually, someone comes along, and decides that making a harp or fiddle from the body of a dead girl is a totally normal thing to do. Then the sound of the instrument accuses or curses the murderer.

I have four versions of this song in my MP3, collection and I actually think Loreena McKennit’s is the weakest of them (but not bad). Crooked Still’s is beautiful. Garmarna’s sounds great, and has Maria Franz from Heilung as a guest vocalist. Pentangle’s version, the first I heard, is probably the most coherent as a story, and is absolutely haunting.

I have often thought this would make a great horror tale. I imagine this musician feeling a compulsion, horrified but unable to stop himself from cutting bits off the corpse and building this cursed musical instrument, and then to play it for the king. If this is the “Wind and Rain” version, the only song that the fiddle will play is “Wind and Rain”, making it recursive, and thus the poor fiddler might have to relive the whole awful experience…

Anyway I’m very curious to see where this version goes.

It’s time for reviews of my Bandcamp Friday picks. For some reason, I still tend to choose a number of albums easily divisible by 2 or 3 to make a nice tidy rectangle for presenting the cover art in a post. I laughed at myself yesterday for still doing that, even though I don’t post them on Instagram anymore, while still intentionally choosing six albums.

Music of the modular ambient/”bleeps and bloops” variety on the Make Noise Shared System. I have had Vol. IV for quite some time and it’s among my favorite albums (keeping in mind that I have a lot of favorites). I chose this one based on a short listen to the start of a couple of tracks, and… it’s okay, but I think I can recommend IV much more strongly.

Abul Mogard does some absolutely gorgeous, warm blankety, kind of dark, slow but deep ambient music. From a forum thread this album seems to be many peoples’ favorite. I listened a little to one of the other favorites and greatly preferred this one. You can fall alseep to it or just listen and enjoy it.

Cujo was Amon Tobin’s first of many psuedonyms. This is a reissue of his only release under that name. For the most part, it’s jazzy breakbeats, often with a bit of Future Sound of London chillout vibe to them. Two or three of the tracks were familiar to me from a compilation or the old mp3.com days — certainly “Cat People” is a classic. A few songs have TV/movie vocal samples that I wish had been omitted because they kind of kill the vibe, but there’s some great stuff here.

There’s a sort of subgenre that is sort of adjacent to synthwave, associated with 1970s-ish “unexplained phenomena,” horror movies and low-budget British TV shows. (Oddly, this is not what people mean when they say “hauntology,” nor is it “Witch House.”) I am into this more than the neon sunsets and Ferraris and early computers vibe of actual synthwave, and I think The Night Monitor might be the best at that. This album is an absolute delight within that context. There are no samples from documentaries at all but none are needed. Just the right kind of composition with just the right kind of warbling, echoing, tape-distorted analog synth sound (or a close enough digital emulation) to carry the vibe.

More from nonbinary techno producer and game developer Zvrra. This album is not straight up techno all the way through, but all manner of things and they’re all good… sometimes lopsided polyrhythmic techno, sometimes no beats at all and I kind of want to say “ambient” or “soundscape” but it doesn’t have that vibe, it’s just… fresh and creative. I like this, a lot.

I have been waiting for another release from Belief Defect since the first one, but the pandemic and other factors delayed things. It was worth the wait. This sounds a bit different but as the album description says, we live in a different world now. It’s still deep and dark and heavy though. There are some live drum parts, and guest vocals/spoken words from activists Cornel West and Chris Hedges as well as an especially badass song with guest vocalist Ana Gartner. Here’s hoping that their next release will come in less than six years!

That Mesmer character in Guild Wars 2 is doing great now. With the staff, damage is gradual and tends to build up over time; meanwhile you’re shielding and dodging. It’s fairly survivable as long as you don’t get paralyzed. But as soon as you unlock Mirage Cloak, your damage gets a big boost, especially with some other synergies, and unless you get locked down even harder you can usually teleport, cloak or shield yourself somehow. The small fights become much smaller and the big ones are also smaller.

So between the Scourge (Necromancer), Scrapper (Engineer), and Mirage (Mesmer) I’m actually not sure which I like more.

I’m at 24 Black Lion Statuettes now and my goal was 25 for the crossbow pistol. I have still gotten exactly ZERO keys on this character from finishing 8 zones. According to a probability calculator there is a < 5% chance of this happening, so I have to wonder if there’s a bug or unannounced change… or if I’ve just been really unlucky.

jumbletron

I decided to go ahead and order Jumbler. Even if I decide it can’t replace Silhouette, there are other ways to make it fit — lots of utilities it can perform, if not quite to the same extent as those other modules. There’s also Katowice, Legio, and Univer Inter that could be set aside. However, I’ll make sure to leave plenty of time for deliberation before selling off anything. (Katowice for instance might be great in feedback loops with Jumbler. If I want to do a JF/Multimod patch with the A-130-8, Jumbler could rearrange the assignments… and so on.)

I did consider just saying “that’s a cool module but I don’t need it” — that would absolutely have been a valid call. But I decided to go ahead and indulge that curiosity. Jumbler is just such a chameleon. The most obvious thing may be routing several modulators to several destinations and then changing them up. But it can act like Nearness; it can rotate stuff circularly in stereo; you can use it as a switch, scanner/crossfader, waveshaper/distortion, even just a single VCA. It’s a matrix mixer but with macro control. Very likely, feedback patching will be rewarding.

The album is ready to go tomorrow morning. I’m pretty happy with it, and also eager to take off those creative restrictions and just play.

There have been a couple of more thoughtful than usual threads lately at MW, even in the midst of pre-Superbooth announcement excitement. One is “Have you ever experienced magic with your modular?” Why yes. The other is “A philosophical question,” which is about the idea of choosing modular over other synthesis methods to have more control. Most of us agree that’s not what we’re looking for — there’s a certain relinquishment of control, a collaboration with the machine’s behavior and a de-emphasis of perfectionism that seems to come along with embracing modular, at least as a mindset. Modular does allow more control in the sense of taking off the training wheels and safety nets, freedom from the restrictions of MIDI and plugin/host architecture etc… but it’s also just kind of inherently messy. Noisy, imprecise, a Wild West.

a jumble

WorldFest was a bit of a letdown, at least in the food and shopping department. The shopping was… maybe okay if you like handmade soap or crocheted crafts, but was pretty much lacking in the “international” part. There was one Guatemalan food truck and very little else — apparently other food trucks had bailed at the last minute, possibly thinking that the morning drizzle would keep customers away. They were wrong and the Guatemalan truck had a long line and sold out of some stuff. I would say it was good but not amazing; I’d try some of their other stuff sometime. But we missed the bellydance group while waiting in line for it in a chilly drizzle.

Some of the performers that we did see weren’t really ready for a public performance. The Mexican guy with the guitar was definitely good, but it’s just not my thing. But we came for the taiko, and they didn’t disappoint. The director, Andrew, spotted me and a couple of other former members in the crowd and gave us shout outs. I’m invited back anytime… but as fun as taiko can be, it requires a huge effort and a significant time commitment that just doesn’t leave enough for my own music.

Quick review of the most recent order of shaving stuff:

  • Taconic Shave, Tequila Lime shave cream: not a hard soap but sort of a meringue-like texture, where a smallish amount easily whips into an impressive lather. Smells absolutely delicious like it’s something I’d really want to drink or a tasty dessert. Works very well and I got a super smooth shave from it. This is definitely in the running for a favorite.
  • Catie’s Bubbles, Irish Coffee shave soap: it does smell quite a bit like Irish coffee, but also a little bit like coffee candy. I knew when I ordered it, this might or might not be a good idea for a scent. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either… I think. It deserves another try at least. I’m not entirely sure there isn’t a sort of off next-day smell, but I could have been picking up something else; sometimes my sense of smell is weirdly sensitive to certain things.
  • Catie’s Bubbles, Retreat shave soap: the description of this one is “Dreamy sandalwood holding up a kiss of citruses and neroli. Frankincense, rockrose, patchouli, and elemi round everything off.” I’m not a big patchouli fan, but as expected it’s a subtle part of the blend. I definitely get sandalwood — mild rather than sharp and spicy — and a little hint of frankincense and the citrus. It’s definitely pleasant, but I think I would put it a little bit behind Midnight Dreary.
  • Southern Witchcrafts, Druantia aftershave splash: oh my this is good. I used this first on the same day that I used the Tequila Lime, and maybe they worked together just perfectly or maybe it was the amount I used or the dampness/dryness of my face when I applied it… or maybe just my perceptions. But that first experience with it was magical. Euphoric even. And it lingered the next day; I could still smell it while eating those chicken nachos. It is complex; sometimes I get the mossy thing, sometimes woody, sometimes spicy or powdery. I ordered a second bottle since there won’t be any more made. It was not as impressive the next couple of times, but it was still quite pleasant. The GFT Coral Skin Food has been set aside (and I may just toss it out).

After mentioning key farming in GW2, I’m making another attempt at a level 80 build to see what I think. I’m going back to one of my earliest builds, a staff-wielding Mesmer, but with a build that’s supposed to be one of the easiest, highly effective soloing builds right now. It’s kind of a slow burn; condition damage that builds up over time. You don’t kill off normal enemies very quickly, but the big ones (so far) seem to go down probably a little faster than average. It’s not tanky, but mobile and distracts enemies with illusions. But this character has had very little luck with keys — that 33% chance to get a key on map completion has given me 0 keys in 8 zones so far.

I’m putting the game on the back burner a little bit though, because I hope to release the new album this Bandcamp Friday. At this point I just have two more songs to master, and the webpage to write up.

Make Noise made a surprise noise announcement Monday: Jumbler, the second in their NUSS (New Universal Synthesizer System) line. It’s a 6 in, 6 out routing module… sort of a variation on a switch, crossfader, or even a matrix mixer with minimal controls. Rotate assigns the inputs to different outputs, while Radiate ranges from switch-like behavior where one input goes to one output, to a crossfade between adjacent inputs, to mixing all the inputs together. This is an all-analog module, requiring a whopping 36 VCAs.

It does share a little with Silhouette — which takes 6 inputs, but then scans them to a single output and also to stereo outputs, with some additional effects. That one has a sort of dual-purpose design: to place sounds in a space, and as an experimental toolset. Jumbler is just raw abstract function though, in a highly versatile design.

I’m pondering whether to pick this up, see how it behave either with Silhouette, or in place of it. There are more videos coming though and I’m waiting on that. I have a concern that Jumbler might not be quite as good at the continuous circular rotation that Silhouette does.