Category: Uncategorized

So yeah. I’ve gone from “I will hold my nose and vote for Biden because the alternative is horrible” to “I’m actually pretty glad to be able to vote for Harris.”

I guess I need to revisit this statement, a bit.

I am not okay with her stance on Gaza/Israel. Or her statement that she will never call for a ban on fracking. Or some of the other things she’s said lately. It makes this election less comfortable than I would have liked.

However. I very much agree with Bernie on this.

On every issue where I find Harris’ stance weak or unpalatable, Trump is inevitably worse. He is a walking disaster, a liar and a criminal, a racist sexist homophobic transphobic xenophobic ignoramus, a weird disgusting moronic con artist, a clearly sick old man who should be in prison, not in office.

I have tried not to pay attention to the polling, tried to stay away from doomscrolling. One still absorbs things, and this race is way closer than it should be. TFG is so bad, he should have less than the “crazification factor” level of support, and yet here we are, people supporting a man that they know is awful, that they’ve been repeatedly willing to say out loud in front of the press is awful.

Mitch McConnell Called Trump “Stupid,” a “Sleazeball,” and a “Despicable Human Being,” Then Endorsed Him for President

He doesn’t have the qualifications to manage a lemonade stand, to be the captain of a one-person tiddlywinks team, or to get to decide what his family is having for dinner. He doesn’t have the integrity of a wet sheet of one-ply toilet paper. He can’t be reasoned with. He can barely string words together into a coherent (if inevitably wrong) sentence; whatever low cunning he may have once had has surely fled, whether it’s dementia or decades of drug abuse or just getting high on his own ego.

See also: A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles. (Not just more scathing criticism but some insight too.)

Harris isn’t perfect, but if you had to negotiate with someone about condemning genocide, would you rather do it with a moron who can’t spell “genocide” and during his previous term literally told his own staff he wished he had Hitler’s generals because they wouldn’t stop him from using military force against US citizens, or with someone who, at least, supports humanitarian aid for Gaza?

I protest-voted Green in one election. I felt really twitchy about voting for “a lesser evil” and felt like I should vote with my heart. The thing is though… this doesn’t work and it doesn’t help. Yes, I hate it that Democrats can get away with a minimalist platform of “at least we’re not the other guy.” But protest voting is an utterly ineffective form of protest, in our system.

The Democratic party doesn’t care about courting leftist votes; they have written us off as crazy. They would rather try to steal votes from Republicans and those (inexplicable IMHO) undecided voters. Which isn’t great news for their policies/politics generally. But while they have drifted rightward in some respects, in others they’ve stood fairly firm and they do the right thing once in a while. I’ll give the Biden administration some credit for doing some good, even if I feel there was a whole lot more good that really needed to be done.

If people don’t vote for Harris — if they stay home and abstain out of moral outrage, disgust, laziness, or whatever reason, or if they vote third-party or write in AOC or Bernie Sanders as a protest vote, the asshole is going to win. I hate that our system works this way, it’s not right at all. In an ideal world, one should be able to vote one’s conscience, to truly express oneself, to choose a person who would lead with the principles you want them to have. But that’s not the system we have.

Trump must be stopped. And the smarter but equally vile politicians who ride on his bandwagon must be stopped — perhaps even more so. The only way we can do that with the system we have is to put the Democrat in. And then, we work to hold that Democrat accountable, make her do the right thing, and work to change the system so better things are possible in the future.

We had our first non-family-visiting-based vacation to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary (delayed by a season for nicer weather).

I discovered about 4 hours down the road that I was wearing my computer glasses, and had left my regular glasses at home. This worked out better than I expected it would (given that they’re meant to focus at about 3 feet!) but there were times when I really wished I’d had the right ones.

Gatlinburg was beautiful. The most mountainous of mountain vacation spots I’ve ever been to, aside from Pike’s Peak. It is a small town by necessity since it’s nestled in a relatively narrow valley, and it was clearly not designed for the amount of tourist traffic that it gets. But they have a free trolley, areas that are very pedestrian-friendly, and overall it works. Our motel was a small one toward the outskirts but still in town, and the lady behind the desk gave us the first of many warnings about the local bears.

The symbol of Gatlinburg, black bears are normally shy of people and are peaceful mostly-vegetarians. But idiots feed them (quite illegally — think $10K in fines plus over a year in prison) and they start to associate humans with food. This makes them bolder and more aggressive, and they have been breaking into cars, mauling people, etc. They’ve unfortunately had to put down a record number of bears this year and there was one human death. We didn’t see any ourselves during this trip, except from well above on the Ober tramway.

We had a couple of nice breakfasts at Pancake Pantry — delicious food but if you don’t show up within the first hour or less of opening, you may find yourself waiting outside in line for literally two hours — and one at a more humble but solid Southern breakfast place. We got to see Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies — a large and impressive aquarium with a massive tank that features a long underwater tunnel and a nice variety of animals. We visited several shops in the Great Smoky Arts & Crafts Community, and tasted and bought some great cider from Tennessee Cider Company. Ober Mountain and the supposed fall festival that was happening there were an expensive letdown, but we made up for it with a trolley ride to Waffles de Lys after dinner, and the fantastic Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail (especially the Place of a Thousand Drips).

If you’re ever in or near Pigeon Forge I heartily recommend The Local Goat, a large and busy (but worth it) restaurant that serves locally-sourced food. Everything was super delicious and I had probably the best burger of my life, as well as great fried green tomatoes, a very good side salad and a wonderful peanut butter cheesecake.

The next day we drove through Great Smoky Mountain National Park, a wonderful scenic mountain road, and then onward to Myrtle Beach. Our hotel was right on the beach and as we arrived, our balcony overlooked the tail end of sunset. The city itself had much less traffic than Gatlinburg, or rather more space for the traffic it had, despite a Jeep Jam that was just getting started. (Given that it was the end of October, they should have called it Jeepers Creepers.)

The beach was nice and clean, not terribly crowded (being in fall), and the water wasn’t super cold but the waves were rough enough that I only waded in about knee-deep. We spent a fair amount of time in the pool and hot tub, shaded from the sun by a neighboring hotel — high-rises aren’t all bad. We visited the other U.S. Ripley’s Aquarium (there’s a third in Toronto), a bit smaller than the Smokies location but still very nice and with some animals we’ve never seen elsewhere, like a zebra mantis shrimp and sloths. We had lunch at The Hangout (good food and piña coladas, but gets more loud and obnoxious around dinnertime) and dinner (with funnel cake) on the boardwalk.

The next day we drove a ways out of town to the Prince Frederick Chapel ruins, a Gothic revivalist church from the 1840s that had been torn down in the 60s except for its facade and bell tower. There’s a fence and security cameras to deter vandals, but we took several photos and drank in the quiet forest sounds and feeling. When I texted my mom about it, I found out that this is where Cousin George was buried!

But I was feeling increasing cold symptoms at that point. I got through a decent enough (second breakfast) lunch and some good no-sugar-added butter pecan from Kirk’s 1890 Ice Cream Parlor but with increasing fatigue from trying to breathe. I wound up spending the afternoon trying to get some rest, and then back to The Hangout for dinner.

My spouse thankfully took over most of the driving the next day, since I was feeling pretty miserable. We got ourselves to Chattanooga and decided against trying to do anything that evening.

The next morning I thought I was feeling a bit better, and we went ahead with our plans to breakfast at the Bluegrass Grill (extremely good, small breakfast place, highly recommended, again it’s better to come early than later in the morning if you don’t want to wait). I had the best cinnamon roll ever and a half “fancy bacon flight” (one big piece of Jamaican jerk spiced bacon, and one piece of surprisingly subtle orange clove bacon). We visited the Tennessee Aquarium, which is two separate buildings for “River Journey” and “Ocean Journey” and got to pet sturgeons as well as rays. Lunch was at Thai Smile nearby. At that point I was exhausted and we retired to the motel room to rest up, rather than visiting Lookout Mountain or either of the caverns we had as possible destinations. My spouse also started having more serious symptoms as well, and by the next morning, I was the one in better shape so I drove us home. Lovely fall colors in Kentucky and it would have been a generally pleasant and low-stress drive, if not for those colds.

Very glad that I had also taken today off for recovery purposes, otherwise I’d have called in sick. Also this morning I managed to trip over my own pantsleg and blanket getting out of bed, half-caught myself on the bed but slid to the floor and scraped the skin off my knee; then I cut my forehead shaving. I decided there will definitely be no chainsaw juggling today. Perhaps we will go do our early voting, and take care of renewing drivers’ licenses though (this needs to be taken care of soon since they’re closing DMV offices for software updates).

My father-in-law is visiting this weekend, so hopefully we’ll get better soon and not pass this cold on to him too.

Religious stuff: going very well overall. Bringing me a lot of joy and satisfaction, but some confusion, impatience and moments of anxiety too (hopefully resolved, but… anxiety is what it is).

Music stuff: going well too. I was going to wait until post-vacation to start recording material for album 42, but this didn’t actually happen. The two I’ve recorded so far are on the shorter side but have a consistent sound; the real question is whether my creative direction in a couple of weeks is going to match it. But it’s not a serious worry.

The expander for Auza Wave Packets is available for pre-order, allowing more CV control over things. I’m of two minds about it, which means I’m holding off. To make room I’d have to let go of something, and I have a couple of candidates for that, but… changing my setup is not really appealing to me at the moment.

Probably the biggest news in the modular synth world is that Joranalogue released a wild new module in collaboration with Hainbach, the Collide 4. Based on a retro piece of lab equipment, the lock-in amplifier, it adds a few additional features… making it effectively a filter, distortion, TZFM sine/cosine oscillator, and frequency shifter in one panel. It reminds me a bit of Synchrodyne, which also took the approach of “obscure circuit + additional goodies = something weirder than the sum of its parts. It was interesting to find out about but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing I would get along with all that well.

Vacation stuff: Reservations and time off were settled a while back. Cleaning is mainly done (inevitably there’s a last-minute round of floor mopping thanks to the little brat dog). Road drinks and snacks are bought. List of stuff to pack is made. Pet-sitter is coming over to hang out and pick up the key.

The impact of Hurricane Helene on our route was up in the air until a couple of days ago. Some roads are washed out, some areas are restricted. There were disagreements between Google Maps, NCDOT, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But now it looks like we can follow almost our original plan, going just a little more south from Cherokee to join the designated detour route around Asheville.

Work stuff: we are still waiting on certification for the previous release, but are moving forward into development on the next version. We each have our to-do-list and mine is actually almost finished… but I saved the biggest, stickiest problem for last. And there will always be more to do anyway.

Book stuff: Currently reading The Telescope In The Ice, about the IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole (and its construction, the people involved, and astroparticle physics generally). It’s a big array of strings of super-sensitive light detectors, dropped into 1km deep holes drilled in Antarctic ice by hot water jets. It detects when neutrinos passing through the Earth (like they do the time in vast quantities) just happen to collide with matter within a certain range of the array (which they do relatively extremely rarely). And being located where it is, getting people and equipment to it, and living there, is an adventure/hassle in itself.

The previous book was After On, a science fiction novel involving the collision of a shady social networking company, spies, quantum computing, augmented reality and a self-aware artificial intelligence. Very much a story for our time, a satire of tech bros, venture capitalism, the related type of toxic masculinity, and military fetishism, and and it was absolutely hilarious, and almost plausible most of the time. Post-cyberpunk, sure.

The new album, Tin Birds, is now released! 🙂 As usual, it’s free/pay-what-you-want.

Enjoy!

So, yes, we are back in the temple now. I expected having to do some refreshing of my memory, getting used to a new forum organization, catching up on some minimal number of changes (many of them social) and getting to know a lot of new people and catching up with old friends.

What I didn’t expect was a big change that happened about a year ago, which affects the structure and traditions that had been firmly established. Some of these traditions need something new to replace them, and no rush decisions are being made. So things are in a state of transition. It’s a lot to take in, but that means everyone is disoriented, not just newly returned old folks.

Also speaking of chaos, they use Discord now. The internet is quite a different place than it was in the late 90s or even 15 years ago. I’ve mostly been ignoring Discord in other contexts since I find it a sort of weird hybrid semi-persistent chatroom with some awful interface choices, and forums are just better for certain kinds of things. (Particularly for catching up with long-running topics.) But now I have sufficient motivation for dealing with it and I’m starting to not be completely lost there. It definitely does have advantages over IRC or AIM chats, but… holy cow does it need a “jump to first post” button somewhere. I don’t want to read an entire 3-year long discussion backwards.

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Also I have an album to release. I’m really happy with how it turned out! I just need to spend the time concentrating on writing up the info and then publish it.

My “Mastering Chain 9-24” template that I’m currently (literally right now as I type this) using for the next album release looks like this:

I’ve mentioned TB Equalizer Pro before. It’s become my go-to equalizer, and it’s getting more use than I ever had for all my EQs combined thanks to its Transient/Sustained, Direct/Ambience and various dynamic options, as well as a very effective brickwall highpass filter. So it’s no surprise I prefer it for mastering as well as on individual tracks. That said, so far it’s had very little to do because everything’s already in pretty great shape.

Just released yesterday, Waves Curve Equator is a dynamic auto-EQ tool in the same neighborhood as Gullfoss, Soothe, TEOTE, Wavefactory Equalizer and others. Despite the marketing speak, none of the tools in this category is as effective at fixing truly obnoxious resonances as manually setting up EQ is. But many of them successfully add a bit of polish and clarity. You may or may not be able to consciously notice a difference between the “before” and “after” but things just sound 5-10% nicer. Equator, so far, has been doing a great job at this (offering a bit more sculpting than many and some handy additional options.

DDMF MagicDeathEye is an official emulation of the coveted Magic Death Eye tube-based compressor. I like it because it’s basically foolproof, or “respectful of the source material” as they say. Unless you just crank it up too loudly and it distorts in something further down the chain, you can’t make it sound bad. Sometimes, like with Equator, stuff just sounds better after having run through it. The goal though is to get a bit louder. In my recording process I tend to record at safe levels, quiet-but-not-too-quiet, and normalize to -3dBFS true peak as a starting point. Having done that, I can typically just use some default settings on the compressor and it’ll be good.

SideMinder Max makes sure the stereo image isn’t too wide anywhere (phase correlation issues) while letting me enhance or restrict the width if I want to across four different frequency ranges. My goal is a good stereo image in headphones. Usually by this point though, I have already taken care of any real issues so this is just a last safety measure.

Elephant is my limiter. A chance for a small bit more volume boost perhaps, and more importantly, a guarantee that the peaks of my signal stay below -1dB to make sure whatever compression algorithms Bandcamp uses don’t glitch out.

Span, Correlometer and Youlean Loudness Meter are visual tools for analyzing the results, making sure levels are right and I don’t have anything weird happening. These are no substitute for using one’s ears of course, but still helpful.

Not shown here: OVC128. More often than not I run the output of Bitwig’s mastering pass through this one in Sound Forge. It oversamples 128 times, boosts the signal, clips the peaks and then re-cuts — all of this lets me increase the overall volume some more without introducing anything nasty.

Yes, there’s a lot of redundancy here in terms of getting levels and EQ right. But this is a process that works well for me, and most of the time I can do it on autopilot with my saved template settings. With the music I make I am very much not looking for “pure” sound — I don’t worry about converters, EQing too many times, noise floor etc. but I am picky about certain things, and this setup lets me get it right.

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I do have a name for the album — I realized there was a certain theme to some of the titles and sounds, connected by an obscure quote from another musician, and a general vibe. The cover art is really not my mental “picture” of the scene I associate with all of this, but I think it works.

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What does not work is the Kickstarter for Aodyo Loom, the ribbon-style MPE controller I was so looking forward to. They have spent all the money, they have found that manufacturing costs are out of their reach, and they’re very likely to just go bankrupt and be unable to refund their backers, unless an investor swoops in to bail them out, which seems unlikely.

This is a known risk for Kickstarter, Indiegogo etc. and in my experience, things do usually work out pretty well. (I’m a little more leery of backing indie game developers this way because I’d rather have a playable demo to know I’m going to enjoy the game, but still, a good majority of them do release something.) So I’m not super upset about losing the money this time — it wasn’t that much — just disappointed in not being able to have this seemingly ideal controller.

What I want in a controller is:

• not hideously expensive (this eliminates several “Serious Instrument” options)
• compact, preferably in the 12 inch wide range.
• full support for pressure control; I usually want to use pressure rather than gated envelopes to control levels/filters/etc.
• allows smooth pitch glides.
• reliable.

I guess my hopes are now on the Erae II, which was running under its own Kickstarter and is supposed to be released Any Day Now. There have been public demos and several YouTubers actually playing them, so unless they’ve reached the same manufacturing wall that Aodyo ran face-first into, the outlook seems to be pretty good. This is fancier, and at the non-Kickstarter price, more than I would have liked to pay (but maybe I could snag a used one) but seems worthy from what I’ve seen so far. I might decide that I just don’t need it though… we’ll see.

Operation Write Stuff In Ink has been a great success, not just in that there is ink on paper forming words, but in that I’m finding spiritual clarity and inspiration. I am making connections between experiences and insights from years ago, and some of those connections are to more recent stuff as well.

I’ve decided to reintroduce myself to the temple again, at least on the forum. I was officially part of it from 1998 to 2011, so I’ve been out again as long as I was in. I don’t know yet to what extent I’m going to commit, and don’t feel a need to rush into it.

In that previous phase, I wanted to connect to the Divine and to the Unseen, and I wanted to make myself a better person with a better life. This time, I feel like I have the connection, I just need to do things with it. One can always keep fixing oneself of course, but right now what I’m thinking about is connecting my spiritual practice more deeply to my music in some way that makes both better. An interesting challenge.

Speaking of music… album #41 is now at 53 minutes, assuming I keep all of the material (so far, I think I will). I do still want to record at least one more thing for it though. Preferably to release before we go on our vacation…

Digital platforms mix “digital water” and “sewage” in the same pipes, polluting our information systems and undermining the foundations of our culture, our public health, our economy, and our democracy.

from “Stop Drinking From The Toilet“

I wrote rants against “bad information” and calls for media literacy on my blog before Facebook even existed. People making shit up so they could sound like experts, or to support a pet theory or mindset. Mistakes and guesswork with the disclaimers filed off, presented as fact. Old science, poorly done science, or outright fraud, since disproven but echoing on regardless and finding new ears. Conspiracy theories, whether benign or bigoted. And intentional disinformation.

The situation absolutely got far worse when companies began to profit off of “engagement.”

And I feel like it s gotten a notch worse in the AI era. There are far too many people who are all too trusting of AI — they are language models, not truth models. It’s another disinformation tool that is absolutely exploited and multiplied by bad actors. People want to believe the politicians they support, who they are maybe only supporting because of the lies in the first place.

Be careful out there.

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Album #41 (that’s the only name it has so far) has been hopping along. There’s 33 minutes of material, and I have a plan for the next bit. It definitely has a flavor, with a lot of noisy/glassy digital oscillators and some resonant filters introducing spectral movement, though those words of course don’t adequately describe the sound.

One of the spices in that flavor is the Decadebridge Sn (Tin), a pocket-sized 3-op lo-fi FM drone synth with simplified controls. It has CV control, but a good bit of latency on its pitch and FM inputs but none on its VCA, so if you plan to sequence it, it might call for a gate delay to keep pitches and envelopes aligned. It makes some lovely growls — not really something I couldn’t do with Algo or Spectraphon or a bit of fumbling in software — but it puts inspiration on tap at an almost toylike price.

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The past couple of weekends, I’ve gone for walks around Mallard Lake. It’s 2.6 miles, so it’s decent exercise that I can recover from fairly swiftly instead of feeling wiped out for days. It has a paved section (with many bicyclists, joggers, dog walkers and families with strollers) more exposed to the sun until it runs in the shadow of a tall highway bridge across the river valley, and a dirt/gravel section (pedestrians only and much less traveled) that runs alongside a cliff with little trickling waterfalls, and a moderately heavily wooded, swampy area before emerging into a small tallgrass prairie. It’s a lovely place to walk.

I’ve walked it occasionally before — usually only a few times per year while the weather is cooler, usually in the Halloween to Christmas range. Until this year I haven’t seen wildlife other than birds (lots of birds!) and bugs, but these last two times there have been deer.

Back in those journaling days, I went through lots of notebooks with nice paper that could stand up to a fountain pen, etc. I wasn’t really a stationery geek, though I did love pens.

But for taking notes on the go, I had a Mead Five Star Fat Lil’ Planner. I replaced the silly planner stuff with a plain Fat Lil’ Notebook — spiral-bound and fairly thick, with perforated 3.5″ x 5.5″ sheets that could be torn off if you wanted to. A Cordura-or-something-like-it case that zipped closed securely, the spiral made a good place to tuck a pen or two, and there were a couple extra pockets and enough space to temporarily stash small items inside. Perfect for my needs. And they stopped making them almost 30 years ago, but you can still find a few on eBay.

I almost just bought one to recreate what I had then. But since pocket journals have become much more of a thing since then, what with Moleskine and Field Notes and so on, so I poked around a bit first. Field Notes happens to be 3.5 x 5.5, and there are several other brands in the same format with different types of paper, covers, and price ranges. A6 seems like a nicer size to me and there are several Japanese journal brands that use it, but after reviews and price comparisons, I went for the FN format with a relatively cheap, waxed canvas zippered cover and small Lochby notebooks which use Tomoe River paper that’s supposed to work well with fountain pens. Though I’m not sure yet whether I’ll want to use a favorite rollerball (Lamy Al-Star or Rotring Core) or a (probably Pilot or Lamy) fountain pen.

I want to start journaling again, and I don’t mean blogging. Literally writing with ink on paper. I once did a lot of this as a devotional practice while I was Kemetic Orthodox. I often used a dip pen, or sometimes a fountain pen, and though it wasn’t calligraphy, the pace of writing was more deliberate and meditative. What I wrote was between me and God(s), and I destroyed all of those writings when I left the temple because there were some oathbound secrets, as well as some personal history that didn’t need to be preserved anymore. And this is fine, I have no regrets about doing that.

To keep this short and general and not too personal, I owe a lot to my first several years in the temple. It dragged my self-esteem out of a pit, got me taking care of myself at least somewhat, spurred me to be more serious about music, conspired to get me together with my spouse, and taught me a lot of things. But eventually, I both burned out with the work of being a reverend (while also being a socially anxious introvert) and came to the conclusion that I needed something else for my mental health and personal growth, even if I didn’t know what that was yet. I wasn’t looking for different gods (still loving the same ones), or a different organization (but very likely no organization).

I’ve certainly gone through some phases in the intervening years where I wasn’t sure what I believed or perhaps how I believed, but always disqualified from atheism by my experiences. (I feel like if I have to doubt certain things then I immediately have to doubt everything and that’s just impractical.) I’ve always believed that religion is an art, rather than a poor substitute for science, and now I feel the push to make that kind of art again.