Uncategorized – STARTHIEF

assorted mixed nuts

J.K. Rowling, you bigoted, lying, smug sack of moldering dog shit, I hope you choke on your stupid fucking cigar, and may everything you eat and drink taste like ashes for the rest of your miserable life. You had the rare chance to bring joy to a lot of people as an author… and then you turned your life to bigotry and the denial of other peoples’ dignity. Does it make you happy to know that you have caused suffering, that you have increased the suicide rate of teens and young adults? That you’re now congratulating yourself on helping to have oppressed one of the most vulnerable minorities? You are, frankly, more of a one-dimensional villain than the ones you wrote; your motive makes zero sense, will not enrich you or enhance your reputation in any way, and seems to be simply evil for the sake of evil. You could have gone down in history as “beloved author of fantasy novels for children and young adults” but you instead chose “weirdly bigoted scumbag who condemned herself to irrelevance.”

Now that that’s out of my system…

A couple of things that are in my system now are Nudistort, a weird distortion-plus plugin that one really has to try for oneself to properly appreciate it, and Circa, a 6-layer looper plugin from Audio Damage.

Nudistort came out some time ago and I didn’t try it then. I just sort of dismissed it as “okay, it’s an extreme distortion that makes stuff sound weird, what else is new?” Many such plugins just don’t do it for me. But it got a mention over on Lines, and I took it for a spin — just playing plain sines with MPE pressure using Aalto — and oh wow, it’s fun stuff. Honestly now I wish I’d tried this first, I’d have skipped over Dawesome Hate.

Circa is not AD’s first looper. Enso leaned much more into tape emulation, which sounded great, but many people (including me) found it awkward and frustrating to work with, so it just sat unused. Circa has introduced some improvements, though a few aspects of the workflow are still a little unintuitive. It’s also designed more for freeform experimentation, in other words, my kind of thing.

It has a bit of anti-click going on but it’s far from perfect, especially (it seems) when you start using multiple layers that aren’t 100% synced to each other. Sometimes instead of clicks you get… let’s call them “fuzzy sound floofs” which are far more difficult to clean up. And though it’s meant to sound like a (semi-?)modern digital looper, the artifacts from slowing the replay speed aren’t as pleasant as on something like Jroo Loop or Phonogene. Still, I can work with its limitations, and just in a few short hours of demoing it I’ve had fun and made three different things I want to use in my music.

Previously, Audio Damage was one of the rare plugin developers that did not offer free demos. Instead, they had a no-questions-asked return policy. It was a hassle for everyone involved, as far as I’m concerned, and always made me reluctant. At this point I would absolutely not have bought Circa just to try it, so I’m glad they finally changed positions on this. Demos sell plugins.

I’ve just read Life Isn’t Binary, which as it turns out is less specifically about nonbinary gender and more about social binaries in general. In fact it begins with sexuality, and the erasure of bisexuality, asexuality and other things that… I’m not 100% convinced are really “sexual” as such but not entirely unrelated. Gender is next (considering not just male/female but cis/trans and even binary/nonbinary); relationships, bodies, mental health, conflicts and thinking itself are also covered.

Basically every social binary has emerged from there being a privileged group and a “lesser” group, or an “us” and a “them” or “normal” and “abnormal.” A sort of caste system if you will, where to question the binary is to question privilege, and to be outside that binary is to make one’s life inherently political (like it or not).

all in all

Here’s a progress photo of the lower wall, from Wednesday afternoon:

Construction was finished on Friday afternoon. Sunday, we put in some edge bricks along the top to divide where the wildflowers and grass are going to go; Monday the wall company sent someone to put back our stepping stones on the top tier, spread a straw mulch/grass seed mix where there’s supposed to be grass, and collect the check.

Here it is as of Monday afternoon:

A couple of neighborhood folks have complimented how good it looks. Really, almost anything would have been an improvement over the crumbling walls and rampant weeds and honeysuckle we had before. But it’ll be much nicer once the grass and plants grow in!

We weren’t entirely sure what that protruding pipe thing is next to the sidewalk, but a little internet sleuthing tells me it’s probably a water shutoff valve. Once upon a time, there was a bit of gravel between the sidewalk and old wall so it didn’t stick out so much. Now there’s no lid on the top and it’s kind of full of dirt, but apparently this isn’t a real problem. I’m more worried about someone tripping over it, or parking on it if they get a bit overzealous with the sidewalk parking, particularly in the snow. So maybe we can protect it a bit or flag it/make it more visible.

I had to remind myself again: Trump = brain poison. I have backed out of some threads I was reading on a couple of forums, and I’m happier. But Musk really seems to be circling the drain, so memes mocking him, the Swasticar, Tesla stock prices etc. are pretty funny.

Superbooth 2025 is… wait, it’s still almost a month away? You wouldn’t necessarily know that from following Eurorack forums where the anticipation and pre-event release announcements have already begun. I hope to be able to blissfully ignore them and make no more changes to my rig. So far so good.

Every once in a while on synth forums you’ll see someone say “I’ve been out of the scene for 5 years, catch me up!” There is a new one of those today, and I had to laugh.

We’re talking 6500 or more new Eurorack modules on the market since then; if one assumes that only 1% of them are interesting, that’s still a lot to look into. Some modules will take a lot of research to begin to understand (and really, some things can’t even properly be appreciated until you use them). Some big players in the market have closed for business, and some new lines/platforms have been introduced. Among my favorites, Make Noise and Noise Engineering have been especially busy.

As of right now, about half my modules are < 5 years old (in terms of release date, not purchase date). Out of my own curiosity, here’s the number of modules I have sold (or traded for something else) per year. All of these have been replaced by a “new to me” module (not necessarily newly developed or newly built).

(A bit of what I credited to 2018 might have been 2017; my records were unclear. 2019 was the year I consolidated to one case, sold a lot of stuff off to get an ER-301 and then reversed course. Some of what I sold in 2024 was holdovers that I set aside from 2023, and in 2025 4 of those 5 were holdovers from 2024. But you see the trend toward more stability.)

The “E” album — whatever I end up naming it — is now at 6 tracks, 35 minutes. Moving along.

I may end up creating a separate page just to track my mini-reviews of shaving/skin stuff, as well as one for flavored coffees… and maybe kitty litter if I have to keep shopping around. For now:

Southern Witchcrafts Autumn Ash smells exactly like roasting greasy sausages over a campfire… in a Michael’s with Halloween approaching. The main thing that’s spooky about it is how precisely it smells like that. It is not for me.
Southern Witchcrafts Lycanthropy has a strong jasmine scent, but with a bit of complexity lurking, reminding me a little of a random cologne I got as a gift in my late teens or early 20s… which may not even be a real memory. Anyway, it’s pretty pleasant and I’d gladly get more of it.
I am trying Geo. F. Trumper’s Coral Skin Food for post-shave. There are lime and sandalwood varieties, but those didn’t receive the kinds of rave reviews this one did. It’s got a very strong rose scene, not my favorite floral but not too bad given how little of it you’re supposed to use. I’ll keep it up, but it may be redundant with my favorite nighttime moisturizer (Cetaphil Redness Relieving).

One thing about my updated routine is that the skin of my face, particularly around the chin that was so used to having a goatee for so long, tends to feel warm. Not literally warm to the touch, but internally, if that makes sense. This doesn’t seem to be related to what products I am using, how aggressively smoothly I try to shave, time of day etc. — I think it’s not skin irritation, but an odd sensory thing, I’m just surprised I haven’t gotten used to it yet.

(On coffee? Cameron’s Highlander Grog, and New England Coffee’s Witch’s Potion, Coconut Almond Candy Bar, and Chocolate Hazelnut are the favorites so far. I have three new ones waiting to try once I’ve used my current stash of the Potion though.)

(And on litter? So far my vote goes to Pidan Tofu & Recycled Coffee Grounds. It also contains a small amount of bentonite clay, which helps it to clump and fills in gaps between the small noodle-shaped pellets. I like it because it tracks VERY little compared to everything else we have tried, has practically no dust and seems competent at odor control. It’s pricey, and like most tofu-based litter it’s from China, which means it may be even more pricey next time I have to order some. Possibly still worth it, not to feel like we’re sleeping on gravel — Tidy Cats Clean Paws is supposed to be low-tracking but in our experience was the absolute worst.)

now you’re NOT cooking with gas

Some excitement yesterday as the construction crew hit our gas line.

The first I was aware of it was when firefighters knocked on the door to ask to check our basement. (It was okay.) This was a little bit after 4 PM.

Then Spire, the gas company, came. They bashed the sidewalk open with an excavator, then had to also tear a hole in the street.

Apparently the markings for the gas line had been wrong — the contractor said they’re supposed to go up the hill like they did with the water line. Since the markings for the gas main were on the sidewalk rather than the street where they made the connection, I suspect that might also have been incorrect. Perhaps there was an old inactive line. (He said in 26 years of business, this is the 5th time they’ve hit a gas line, and every time it was due to incorrect markings.)

The gas company has been upgrading everyones’ copper lines (which were only supposed to last 20 years!) to PE, but the wall contractor said they had something like 600,000 homes to do so it had been taking several years. So they took the opportunity to replace ours.

The sun set. They barely had any light to work with, a couple of headlamps and flashlights, but they kept going. I wound up going upstairs to read myself to sleep, but started hearing weird noises coming through the AC vents. Then the heater kicked in and I figured we’d gotten the OK to turn the furnace back on. Then there was a lot of clanging and banging and bright lights at the front (our bedroom windows are on the back of the house) as they started piling stuff back into the holes they’d dug, and covered over the big hole in the street with a metal plate.

Here’s the view this morning. Not shown: a UCIS pickup truck off to the right, presumably trying to figure out how they went wrong with the markings, or perhaps marking the location of the new line as if it isn’t really obvious now.

I really dislike those street plates. I know they’re great for a quick fix but they wind up sitting there for ages before being properly patched. But then, St. Louis county increasingly seems to be behind on road maintenance and has some really low-quality patch jobs on some major roads. There’s one section of Page that was freshly paved only a couple of years ago, but it has long stripes of deep potholes running uninterrupted through the entire length. So our street, which probably should have been resurfaced about 5 years ago, is probably going to have that stupid plate for quite a while.

One of the weird things about this is, nobody from the gas company came to talk to us until they were done. The only information I got was from the firefighters, and from the contractor when I went outside to look around and ask about stuff while the gas company was getting ready to tear up the sidewalk.

dig it

Day one of wall rebuilding happened while I was at work. Some construction begins with demolition:

Last Friday when they parked their equipment in our driveway, our neighbor came over to ask if she could buy the stones from the old wall to use in her garden. I said “just take them, they were going to throw them away anyhow.” She’s older than we are, but clearly in good shape; those blocks are not light by any means, but she wound up taking most of them, building a short temporary wall the length of her driveway until she’s ready to bring them to her backyard. I feel like the wall company should be paying her for the labor!

There’s a frenzy of activity out there this morning, a Bobcat with a scoop on an arm (I’m not sure what these things are called) and a car-sized earth mover, a trailer of more equipment/supplies, a flatbed truck with the blocks. I suspect by the end of the day it’s going to start looking like walls again.

And speaking of demolition:

At the company lunch today, the boss and the other senior engineer were talking about it and literally said “if you want to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs” and then went on to talk about other things. As if there was any sanity in these stupid tariffs, and as if the thing that’s actually been wrong with the US economy income inequality) could be fixed in this way. My guess is, they’re just watching Faux News because they’re conservatives, and they’re not getting the story of how the tariff policy was created using ChatGPT 3 hours before it was announced and is utter nonsense. These two are very smart engineers (and one’s also a mathematician) with doctorates, who are immigrants from two different authoritarian regimes. One of them always talks about how little he trusts “the government” in general… but he’s swallowing the bullshit they’re feeding him.

Trump isn’t making an omelette, he’s just stomping on eggs.

I’ve recorded another couple of tracks, sticking to my “game” rules. I had doubts about both of them during the process. Particularly with the bass tracks, there is more “assembly” than live playing, and as I record I don’t have a solid feel for what the results are going to be. But the results have actually been decent. I’ll continue, but after this I want the next project to be a free-for-all without any rules, because it’s simply more fun and inspiring.

I’ve resigned myself to shaving…

8 weeks of IPL have not reduced hair growth on my face and neck at all — I am guessing because my hair is too blonde (despite what the beard looked like). I’m not completely sure it hasn’t caused some irritation., so I’m going to stop using the device.
Laser might work better depending on wavelength, but a full course of treatment is expensive and only lasts about a year.
Electrolysis is more of a sure thing. But given the amount of time to treat a beard, it would end up costing thousands.
Epilation, for beards, seems to be only for the brave/foolhardy. Beard hair is coarse and the risk of ingrown hairs is apparently relatively high.
Waxing, for beards, seems generally less warned against than epilation. But some say don’t do it at all; others say the first session is really painful; others say it’s just not that effective. A lot of professionals either won’t do it, or just don’t have much experience with it. Given my sensitive skin it seems like a bad idea.

And no, going back to having a goatee or mustache or any of it isn’t happening. I like having a smooth face, for the hours when it stays smooth at least.

So yeah, shaving it is. If I have to do it, I might as well make the most of it and have at least a little fun with it, if that’s the right word. Southern Witchcrafts Druantia is a nice shave soap, with cedar, sandalwood and citrusy notes; I prefer it to the Valley of Ashes formula. (Even though Druantia was basically invented by Robert Graves, who was a poet rather than a historian or anthropologist…) After testing with the LESSN bar again, I think this stuff does work about equally well; the disappointment I had in shave closeness and skin feel the next day was more likely due to needing to change my razor cartridge instead. (I used to be really lax about that, when I kept the goatee. Gotta be more proactive.) I’d originally been planning to go through the SW samples one at a time first and then use the Midnight Dreary, but I think I’m just going to try them all and maybe order some others and just indulge my curiosity.

FDT

Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich man, a weak person’s idea of a strong man, and a stupid person’s idea of a smart man.

I’m not sure who said that first. One site credits Michael Moore, but I don’t know. Anyway. This.

Trump is completely out of touch, living in his rich asshole bubble the way he does — and his dementia (or maybe drug-addled stupor, or both) is increasingly on display.

An old fashioned term that we use — groceries. I used it on the campaign. It’s such an old fashioned term, but a beautiful term. Groceries. It says a bag with different things in it.

I think Robert Reich has this nailed: 10 rules for dealing with Trump’s demands for capitulation

Trump is 100% in this for his own ego. He doesn’t care about trade deficits, about fentanyl, about protecting women or children, about the price of eggs, about the middle class, about farmers, about the rest of the world’s goodwill toward America, or anything else. I suspect he doesn’t even actually care about his various bigotries, he’s just echoing the hate that his cult wants to hear. Trump cares only about making Trump feel important.

He is cosplaying as a head of state, just as he previously pretended to be a shrewd businessman (when the reality is, if he’d parked his inherited wealth in a money market account and started zero businesses, he’d be richer today).

The difference from his first administration is, other scumbags have latched onto him, knowing he’s weak-minded and gullible and doesn’t give a shit; they are playing him, using him as their puppet. Not just Putin this time, but Musk, Zuck, the Project 2025 shitheads, etc. The main dangers in that game are (A) that Trump has no loyalty to anyone but Trump, (B) many of the would-be puppet masters hate each other’s guts, (C) Trump’s increasingly blatant dementia and absolute foolhardiness and that of his cabinet and followers may outpace or overshadow them achieving their goals, and (D) wrecking necessary governmental institutions and crashing the economy doesn’t help the billionaires. As Musk sees with Tesla stock plunging, sales falling off, dealerships being vandalized etc. The leopards are eating everyones’ faces here.

Also this:

It is very likely that the tariff policy was generated by ChatGPT. And it includes tariffs against islands that are inhabited only by penguins, and against the British India Ocean Territory, which is occupied only by a joint US/UK military base (the original population having been forcibly deported to other islands by the UK in 1968-1973). Of course, the stupidity of those details pales in comparison to the economic and diplomatic stupidity of the tariffs in the first place.

And then there’s Elon, whose DOGE has basically been nothing but piracy:
Elon Musk Can’t Take the Heat
Everything is blowing up in Elon Musk’s face
‘Constant failure’

Five months ago, The Economist (not known to be particularly leftist…) said on a magazine cover that America’s economy (under Biden) was “the envy of the world.” Today:

Oddly, I am hopeful that billionaires and would-be billionaires, and all those people who put on blinders to Trump’s idiocies up to this point, will collectively admit the so-called emperor has no clothes, withdraw their support, pressure other Republicans to resist Trump’s worst excesses, discredit the entire MAGA / Project 2025 program, and walk back on all of the hateful bullshit. The cognitive dissonance can only stretch so far. Right?

Right…?

Anyway, enough of that.

I started reading Jonathan Stearne’s The Audible Past yesterday. Though it’s the kind of intellectual thing that could have been very dry, the writing style prevents it from being too much so and it’s telling an intriguing story. For instance: Alexander Graham Bell, before the telephone, wanted to make devices to “help” deaf people — by which he meant, train them to pass as hearing in mainstream society. (He was a eugenics fan and opposed to deaf folks having their own language and culture.) He and Clarence J Blake invented the “ear phonotograph,” which used an actual human middle ear sourced from a dead guy (unlike the earlier phonotograph) to transcribe sound waves onto paper.

But the same day I started reading this book, we had a thunderstorm and a very close lightning strike took out my computer speakers. There was a super bright flash from the lightning and basically instantaneous thunder, and I’m pretty sure I did hear a “pop” from the speakers. They were cheap, a barebones older generation of Creative Pebble speakers, not really used for music production. Still, it irked me to have to untangle their cables, toss it away and buy another pair. This time I’m going for a slight upgrade, Creative T100, still very much computer speakers and nothing super hi-fi though. The acoustics and noise in this room aren’t worth spending more, and I feel like my music is headphones-oriented anyway.

The shaving soap and brush arrived. I mostly like the scents as they sit in their containers. I’ve used Southern Witchcrafts’ “Valley of Ashes” twice so far, once without and once without the “Smolder” pre-shave oil.

The description of the scent notes of that one is odd: “Coal, Tar, Bourbon, Tobacco, Bitter Citrus, Smoke, Leather, Motor Oil, Burning Rubber, Diesel, Clove, Birch Tar, Bergamot.” Some folks online say it smells like an old-fashioned but well-kept auto repair shop, or “like Alfred working on the Batmobile” or other such things. I’m really not getting the hydrocarbon thing from it at all, nor big masculine energy; especially with the pre-shave oil I’m getting more of an impression of frankincense maybe. To me it’s slightly unusual but pleasant, and does smell like something one should be shaving with.

This is my first time using a shaving brush, and this soap does lather up very quickly and is smooth, but “thin” rather than “bulky” the way the LESSN bar can be. As I shave I don’t end up with clogs of semi-solid gunk on the razor that needs to be re-melted and rinsed off with hot water. I would say it’s not as moisturizing, and my face doesn’t seem as smooth the next day. After two shaves there’s still enough in the sample container for one or maybe even two more rounds, and I’ll go ahead and finish it before trying the next thing. (Actually I’m also curious how LESSN works with the brush instead of directly rubbing it on.)

The wall contractor’s going to park some equipment in our driveway today, so that’s a sign of impending progress — hopefully the work will start on Monday, which is forecast to be dry and cool again after this stormy week.

“under construction” status is under construction

Another day, another set of sidewalk stripes. This time we have yellow, to mark a gas line. It goes near the cherry tree that the wall folks were already going to have to be careful of. Lots of rain is forecast for this week though, so I don’t expect the wall construction will begin quite yet, and we don’t have a date for it yet.

The first company I reached out to about siding repair got back to me Friday and said they have a $1000 minimum repair fee and an 8 week lead time. (They could have started with that…!) It’s one strip of siding and I really don’t want to overpay for that. So I’m in the process of getting some other quotes; the next one will be April 9.

I finally recorded the first track for the next album project. For all that people claim that restrictions are good for creativity, I’m going to say that they can be good… or they can get in the way. There have been a few times where if it hadn’t been for the “must be bass” restriction I’d likely have recorded something. But sometimes I just don’t want to pick up the bass and start with that — the process is quite different with it. Important lesson learned already!

The track itself is okay, perhaps good (I need more distance to judge it). It’s not what I was imagining when I started. I had planned to use Multimod/Nearness to create some stereo spread and subtle detuning, and play something melancholy and slow. But I wound up smashing the “subtle” to go for equal-interval chords with random time jumps, a very granular-ish effect. Along with a deeper drone, it works.

“Regular” chords in Western music theory usually have mixed intervals — they are not symmetrical, and that asymmetry lets us very easily identify major and minor triads and their inversions. C-F-A is recognized as a major chord and the root is F. But C-F-B♭ has equal intervals, so there’s no identifiable root. Inversions like B♭-C-F seem asymmetrical, but they don’t decode to anything we recognize. So it’s very enigmatic and open-ended. Jazz hands!

I’ve been continuing to play Guild Wars 2. March brought discounts on various in-game cosmetic and utility stuff, and among other things I got myself a Shimmerwing skin for my skyscale — sort of a unicorn/dragonfly/dragon hybrid I guess. No actual money spent nor shady dealings. I’ve never been one to farm for gold, but several years of playing meant I had a lot of hoarded crafting materials, secondary currencies, weapon skins I never cared about etc. that could all be sold in-game for gold and then converted to gems. Enough for a nifty mount and fancy pants and a cool cape.

(The one thing I still want for my characters is a crossbow pistol, which converts the loud shooty sounds of other pistols to a satisfying, suitable sproing-whoosh-thunk. That requires 25 Black Lion Statuettes, and I have… 6, after kind of squandering them on armor skins that I wound up not using all that long anyway. You get one with every chest unlock, but the keys are rarer than they used to be — granted at particular Personal Story steps (with per-week per-account limits) or randomly on completing a map. This is to encourage people to spend actual cash on them. Feh.)

[note: forgot to actually write this part originally, added the next day] Alongside my Scourge, I’ve leveled up another character to 80 — a Scrapper this time, engineer who specializes in the warhammer and has a ton of combo field effects and finishers which generate Quickness. Very effective, if not quite as much of a survivor as the Scourge. I took her through the entire “personal story” (defeating the Elder Dragon Zhaitan) because I forgot how much bullshit the final part of it is. You’re standing on the deck of an airship with 6 cannons, trying to operate all of them by yourself while being bombarded with poison and undead dropping onto the deck, as other crew members stand around doing nothing belowdecks. You have to shoot down smaller dragons, but the targetting for them with the cannons is extremely buggy. Then the final fight is similar, but with bigger cannons and a bigger dragon and more crap being thrown at you. Not particularly fun.

After that I decided to go ahead and start End of Dragons, the expansion I’d bought on sale some time back (which unlocked additional professions specializations) but hadn’t actually played. This gives me access to the land of Cantha, jade tech, fishing, skiffs, and eventually siege turtles. None of those things are great — jade tech is mostly for a few “puzzles” only in Cantha, fishing isn’t great, and all of the movement-related stuff is inferior to skyscales and skimmers. But it’s been a really beautiful set of areas so far and the story’s been fun… even though each time I start one of these stories, I realize that skipping over the “Living World Season ____” stories means I have no idea who half the NPCs are or their history with each other.

Today is the Transgender Day of Visibility. It’s also a work-at-the-office day, so I was pondering various things. I chose not to be as overt as I might have liked. I was going to at least wear a pink shirt with a blue undershirt, but then I spilled peanut butter on that.

So all I really did was add “The Shark” tarot card enamel pin, which I got as a random extra with an order of other pins, to my hoodie. It looks more than a little like Blåhaj, which is probably just coincidence. I also have my nonbinary dragon pin on that hoodie anyway. And enby and trans pride flag stickers on my car, which given where I work, more people are going to see anyway. So I’m not completely invisible.

Among the other books mentioned by The Trans and Nonbinary Hero’s Journey was H.E. Edgmon’s The Witch King and its sequel Fae Keeper. A young transmasculine and gay witch, fated to wed a Faery king, had escaped to Earth but gets dragged back into all the horrible politics. It’s really a lot of fun. The MC’s problems are not from the relatively minimal transphobia and practically zero homophobia in the book, nor from dysphoria… but from traditionalist Fae bigotry against witches, serious doubts about marrying into royalty, jealousy, out-of-control magic (leaving physical and emotional scars), and general fish-out-of-water-ness. That’s enough for one character to have to deal with. I really enjoyed the first book and have started in on the second.

I’ve got another bunch of books on the way via Alibris: JES’ The Audible Past, as well as Life Isn’t Binary and some more nobinary, trans and queer fantasy.

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.