Uncategorized – STARTHIEF

what do you mean, an African or a European sparrow?

The “J album” now has all its recording done, a name, an album cover (hush, Sean Connery), and is partially mastered. That process has been a little tricky and slow on a couple of tracks so far, but it’s moving along.

I’ve decided that, when Budapeszt is released, I’m going for it. I’ll plan to set aside Rings and Katowice — however, depending on how it goes I might want to at least try Budapeszt and Rings working together.

As a sort of apology to my no-gear pledge, I’ll forgo any new software synth this year.

I’ve decided I’m annoyed enough with Big Tech in general and Google specifically — now they are planning to completely replace their search with an AI-based mess — so I’ve decided to move away from their services a bit more. I’ve heard good things about GrapheneOS but am not quite ready to step away from Android yet. YouTube isn’t really something I want to give up either. But search, browser, calendar, notes, email, and maps? Those all have more or less decent replacements.

The email change is the most work, because I’ve been giving that email address out like candy for both important and trivial things. But having GMail forward to my new email makes the transition not terribly painful nor something I have to fix immediately. And now I have multiple email addresses, with their own folders, on my own domain, on a single login. Nice.

For Maps, Here WeGo isn’t as refined as Google’s offering, but it’s functional enough (and in some ways the interface is a bit nicer), and private.

For mobile browsers, I don’t remember now why I switched back to Chrome — it may have been DDG trying to promote AI crap at me — but I’ll have another go at other options.

As for search… I am going to give Kagi a try. StartPage and DuckDuckGo are less of a mess than Google Search has become, but they’re still honestly not great. Every review of Kagi I’ve read has been like “this is the best subscription to anything that I have.” So… yeah.

blown away

Xaoc Budapeszt: I’m waiting on a demo of this, and will update once I’ve heard it.

My impressions while watching this were something like this: it sounds neat… no, that’s just over the top… oh nice!… yuck… oooh… cool… meh… oh wait OMFG OMFG YES!!!

For a long time now I’ve hoped some enterprising synth designer would take the source code for Mutable Instruments Rings, and do something more with it instead of just cloning the module as is or implementing it in a plugin or whatever. The big thing I wanted was more variety of / control over structures.

While I doubt Xaoc used Emilie’s code, this takes the same core concept — bandpass/comb filters as resonators — and runs with it in a different direction. Less prescriptive, but more variety. There’s a taste of 4ms Spectral Multiband Resonator and Smoothie Audio Smear in there as well. And it’s true stereo and also dual, with the two filter(bank)s interacting in feedback. And… it’s glorious!

It’s still in the prototype stage, with an expected release somewhere in the autumn. And I have my No New Gear Year pledge, and I’m thinking about that. I know for sure I’m going to want this module and will get it anyway, so how much sense does it make to wait until January 1, 2027 just for the sake of that pledge?

Because this is pretty much a must-have module for me, if anything is. I’m getting the excitement about it I did for Rings originally, but with much more modular experience on my side I have even bigger expectations and plans.

I’m comfortable with swapping out Rings for Budapeszt, but Budapeszt is 6HP larger so I’ll need to figure something else out. Katowice might be an appropriate choice, as it’s the one I said I’d allow myself to sell to make room for stuff — the things I do with it can be done by plugins.

Alternately, there’s Castle. I know, every time I contemplate letting it go, I patch it up and say “no, I have to keep it.” To be honest though, I have a lot of FM stuff, and don’t strictly need this specific flavor. That opens a lot of space for other things. But I’d want to be slow to fill that space.

Or there’s Nibbler, fun but not really a frequent flyer. GTE — I know I just got it and haven’t even explored it all that much, but it’s unlikely to ever really be an essential. Perhaps one might say I should have held off on it and made Budapeszt my new module for 2026.

For that matter… I want to put some thought into combining “get Budapeszt” with “shrink my rig.” I could clear out enough space to let go of the Pod60, and also bid adieu to the Elmyra and other small desktop thingies — keeping the main case, Minibrute/Strega pair, and the four pedals. The problem with this is that introduces the temptation to fill the Pod again, or to put something else in the newly available space.

Of course, these opinions are colored by the droney approach I’ve been taking with this album — there’s been even more minimal use of sequencing than my usual. I’ve been loving that process. I just don’t want to commit to all future releases being similar.

I will have at least several months to make any decisions, anyway. But that’s what’s on my mind now.

I have 61 minutes of music for this album recorded but I’m not quite done — I think there’s going to be one more track. And then on to the “Z” album, which I have some thought toward already…

I just saw this image posted on Lines, and… yes, that describes me and my music to a T.

cont’d.

Herodotus did get some things right, and he rightfully showed skepticism over certain claims and stories or at least said “this is what I was told…” But he reported a lot of stuff without such disclaimers. Some of the wilder claims from his Histories that are given as fact:

Egyptians have thick, strong skulls that can’t be smashed with a boulder, and Persians have thin, weak skulls that can be shattered by a pebble. This is because Egyptians shave their heads and are exposed to the hot sun, while Persians keep their heads covered.
Egyptians are the oldest civilized culture and are greater than Greeks, but the “backwards” flow of the Nile naturally causes them to do certain things backwards. For instance, they knead dough with their feet, and Egyptian men pee squatting while the women pee standing up.
Cassia comes from Arabia and is guarded by flying serpents; those harvesting it have to lull them to sleep by fumigating with storax. These same flying serpents try to invade Egypt every year but are defeated by ibises.
Arabia also has ants bigger than foxes but smaller than dogs, which dig up gold and can kill camels. People crossing the desert have to ride on female camels with a pair of (slower) male camels, and if pursued by ants, they release the males as a distraction while they make their escape.
Camels’ back legs have four knees and four thighs.
Lions only ever give birth to one cub because the fierce claws ruin their mothers’ wombs. (I don’t think he followed this idea to its mathematical conclusion.) Rabbits, on the other hand, can get pregnant while already pregnant at any stage, giving birth to endless streams of babies without limitation. Both of these, um, “facts” are divine miracles.
Ethiopians are the tallest and most beautiful people on earth, and so strong that nobody else can draw their bows. Their skin is black because it’s been burned by the sun… and their semen is also black. (Please see a doctor.)
The Enarees (transgender priests) of the Scythians are that way because they’ve inherited a curse from ancestors who sacked a temple of Aphrodite.
It’s very unlikely that there is a sea to the west of Europe.
When Egyptian women die, their families let the corpses rot at home for several days before sending them for embalming to discourage necrophilia.
In India, when a parent dies, the children eat them.
Everything in history plays out exactly like a Greek tragedy, complete with irony, hubris, misleading oracles, and wars and assassinations that are always caused by women and/or personal insults.

I know I did earlier first takes on new gear announcements, but things move fast and now more has been revealed. Thoughts:

Bastl Kalimba is a sort of hybrid electronic/electroacoustic instrument where twanging tine-shaped PCB bits triggers resonators, I guess somewhat like Korg Wavedrum did. Physical modeling and FM, but also pressure sensing and effects and looping and glide and pads and drones and other stuff. Definitely pretty neat, and I approve. At the price, I can remind myself I said no more desktop synths and can let it pass by without anguish — if it was cheaper I might have broken. But nothing is cheap now, and they spent considerable development time on this and it’s more than the toy it appears to be at first.
Buchla Ziggy: “not even next year” thing for me. In what I’ve heard so far, it pretty much doesn’t sound like a 208c. It has no sequencer of its own and its “cycler” can’t trigger an external sequencer either. I don’t like it when presets fight with analog pots, and don’t think a simple synth like this needs presets at all. It just can’t offer me anything, really.
Make Noise Plexiphon: some of my guessing was wrong. To categorize it simply, it’s more in the vein of Desmodus, Valhalla Supermassive, or Phonolyth Cascade — somewhere between delay and reverb, where the “Plexus” knob affects feedback networks that determine which way it leans. Some of the mojo seems to come from short delay times and the way the feedback loops interact with diffusion. But playing with Cascade just now, I’m realizing what an underrated thing I have in that — so I’ll play with it more and have talked myself easily out of Plexiphon already.
Expert Sleepers Forever was the one that stood the greatest chance of maybe sneaking into my rig in 2027. It’s just a nice simple smooth texture-preserving buffer freeze effect with overdub features. But like Plexiphon, it got me playing with plugins and I found happiness of different flavors with Cascade, Raum and SpecOps; with the latter I produced a drone that’s going into the next recording for sure. So again, I will nod and say “that’s cool” and happily let it pass me by.
Xaoc Budapeszt: I’m waiting on a demo of this, and will update once I’ve heard it. I’m quite curious to hear demos — it’s a dual stereo comb filter (or “exploratory spectral lattice” as they call it) with internal LFOs and some different feedback options to get them interacting. Chorus and flanging are among more esoteric things it can do. It’s 20HP, so if it turns out to be spectacular it’ll be a difficult call to make… in some other year. But again, maybe it can inspire some fun usage of software.

hero.us

I”m reading Herodotus’ The Histories now. For those not familiar, he was a 5th century Greek historian, “the father of history” according to Cicero lately. But these writings, themselves certainly a piece of history, are to history what alchemy was to chemistry. Not rigorous, and full of wild stories that are uncomfirmed, in some cases with an “allegedly” disclaimer and in many cases, without. So many events in these “histories” are suspiciously very much in the form of Greek tragedies. There are grains of truth, obvious tall tales, and probably quite a lot that’s somewhere in between. I suspect he got a lot of his stories from people who either made them up or didn’t know what they were talking about, and embellished them along the way.

And also, reading it is sometimes like reading the dullest part of the Silmarillion — lots of place names that mostly have no context for a modern reader, and lots of people with brief mentions that we never hear from again, making it hard to follow and rather dull. But I will endure, because it’s got some entertaining bits as well (whether because they’re wildly improbable/inaccurate or just good stories) and references that are still used to this day. And some history, whether originally true or not, repeats itself — Trump’s ill-advised attack on Iran, Croesus’ ill-fated attack on Persia, really not so different.

I’ve continued to be happy with the Stelo glucose monitoring, and signed up for a subscription. I may eventually decide to discontinue it once I’ve learned more, but there are still occasional surprises. Like the Oura, it’s also serving as a constant reminder to pay attention to my health. Fast feedback is easier to learn from than eventual consequences, especially once you’ve had a small taste of the latter to really appreciate the importance.

Music’s definitely going well — four tracks at 35 minutes so far, and a patch more than halfway ready to record after work today. Honestly, finding a mesmerizing drone texture and just sitting with it for a while, then building on it a bit is super easy, at least with experience. I’m thinking I will keep recording a ton of stuff for a while, then release the best of it.

It’s not really pure Éliane Radigue drone all the way, there’s some light sequencing, some shifting of filters to bring out different resonances in a way that suggests chord changes or melody, etc. But I would call it more drone than not, where XQSTCRPS was more not than drone. There are certainly stretches where there is just subtle variation to follow with the ears and heart 🙂

Superbooth weekend is nearly upon us, and new synth teasers and announcements have been flooding in. I, of course, still intend not to buy any more music hardware in 2026, and at most one software synth and two more software effects. So is this a test of my resolve? For the most part I’m finding it easy to say “oh, that’s neat and I don’t need it” and move on. A few things I’ve taken note of:

In a blurry still from a blurry teaser video, Bastl seems to be doing something with a kalimba. Whether this is their budget answer to the Korg Phase 8, or they have a new contact mic or are just using it to demo an effect, is unclear. I’m curious…
Expert Sleepers has a “temporal freeze” module called Forever, based on their algorithm from the Disting NT. Like a smaller version of the Blukac Endless Processor in some ways. It sounds pretty great, preserving the textures of sounds quite well without noticeable granular or spectral artifacts. Something I should look into in software probably.
Neutral Labs has the Queen Elmyra. It takes the Elmyra/Elmyra 2 concept and just runs with it in a different direction, an 8-voice drone machine with higher sound quality, a ton of patch points, more DSP effects, tube saturation, etc. Out of my budget range, but I still think it’s a fun place for them to go.
Buchla Ziggy. This is the biggest surprise — it takes the 208c concept (top half of an Easel), gives it MIDI and Euro-compatible control inputs, digital routing and no patch cables, and DSP effects, and (ugh) presets, and it costs about a third as much. I was immediately intrigued and thought “maybe I’ll plan to buy one next year.” But after some thought: it’d probably have to replace the Minibrute which is such a great partner to the Strega, and I think that’d be a net loss in my rig’s capabilities. I was momentarily dazzled by the Buchla name. I’m still looking forward to hearing some demos though.
The new firmware for CVilization was just released, offering a quad oscillator as an alternate mode. It’s not like I need more oscillators…! But there are two modes I’m not using at all, so I might as well do the upgrade.
Make Noise Plexiphon (someone ferreted this out a couple days earlier than the official announcement). My guess is spectral processing, but it could be some kind of dispersion thing like Arturia Efx Refract.
Xaoc is teasing some stuff, and I find they’re always worth curiously watching.
Komplete 26 was just announced… wait, actually I do not care about this at all, since I already got Absynth 6. (Which I haven’t been using very much, though it’s pretty decent.)

it happens every year

It seems like every summer we have an extended power failure. The last two years it’s been right around July 4 weekend, when hot weather with no AC becomes an issue. Hopefully we have gotten this year’s out of the way now…

The outage from the storms lasted a total of 16 hours, and there were no updates at all from the power company during the whole process. In fact the last “update” (with no changed information) was at 3 AM, only 6 hours into the mess.

So Monday night we went to retrieve our rescued dairy products from my parents’ fridge… only to have the power go out again Tuesday as my lunch break from work was wrapping up. This time, instead of small clusters of 10 homes without power here, 50 there, 1 elsewhere, it was one big batch of 1400. My UPS estimated 38 minutes of usage, but it seemed to actually give about half that or less. I waited a little while to see if the power would come back, then dragged myself to the office to finish the workday, figuring that we’d have to shuffle our groceries again. Naturally as soon as I arrived I got a text from my spouse saying the power was back. Then the power company said it was restored.

I started getting a little more used to the sound of those Space 2 headphones, but I found I really didn’t like them for walking around even just for a short while at work. They’d have been completely unsuitable for a longer walk in warmer weather. So I gave them to my spouse (who’s a bit less picky about sound, and just wanted some wired headphones to use for her computer… they do wired as well as Bluetooth) and researched open earbuds.

There are a few categories of designs for them, but the generally favored style now seems to be one where there’s a little speaker blob that sits in front of your ear canal, attached via flexible band to a battery blob that sits behind your ear. It doesn’t pinch but remains both secure and comfortable. Eliminating the most expensive options, almost every reviewer gives top marks to the Soundcore Aeroclip. But a strong second, among those that reviewed it, is the Tozo Open EarRing… nearly as good in sound quality and 1/3 the price (or less!) I opted for those…

…and I’m not at all disappointed. I was listening to Heilung and Client_03 on them at my home office today and didn’t feel tempted to switch back to my studio headphones; after work I gave Stärker’s Spectral (a Bandcamp Friday pick) a first listen while walking around the park. Super comfortable. Decent but not perfect sound — open earbuds can’t deliver much sub-bass. But what’s there is clear and pretty well balanced and doesn’t feel “wrong.” There’s no sound isolation, nor active noise cancellation… but there’s no air isolation either which feels great. The charging case even has a nice LED screen to show its charge level and that of the two buds. I wouldn’t mix or master an album on them, but for a day at the office or some exercise, at this price I could hardly be happier with them. Maybe eventually I’ll upgrade to the Aeroclip (perhaps when there’s an updated version) or even Bose or something.

Speaking of Bandcamp Friday, I really focused on dark ambient this time. In addition to the aforementioned Stärker, I went for Schloss Tegal, TROUM & Raison d’Etre, Kloob. One from Muied Lumens and a live album from Kristoffer Liselgaard rounded it out, and while not strictly dark ambient they’re not all that far off from it either. I guess this kind of goes with my inclination toward a more droney form in my own recording project, but I also turned away a bit from more typical ambient stuff (stringlike pads playing calm major chords, you know the sort of thing).

in the dark

Yesterday I woke up, felt only a little bit blah but sleepy enough to burn a sick day. We had severe thunderstorms morning, afternoon and evening. Our house was within a tornado warning zone once, and my parents’ place was in one three times. That third time we got a lot more wind, some hail and heavy rain, and then the power went out at about 7:20.

About an hour later we rescued some groceries from the fridge and brought it to my parents’ place, since they still had power (and a generator besides). We were joking about how the notification that power was restored would come right as we pulled into their driveway. Nope — 11 hours later and we have no power and no estimate.

I didn’t sleep very well, and wound up going in to the office 45 minutes early for the comfort, phone recharge, and blogging.

I recorded my first track for the new album, and had planned to do a second one yesterday but the weather killed that. I feel like getting back to more of a drone style with this one, since I strayed so far from it with XQSTCRPS.

Those replacement ear tips I ordered were WORSE than the stock ones for getting stuck in my ear — it happened pretty much on the first try and the stuck one was more difficult to remove. So that’s a no. Poking around online I saw several other complaints about the Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro having that issue. I decided to retire them, though I liked them a lot aside from this (serious) problem. Figured I’d try over-the-ear wireless headphones, and settled on the new Anker Space 2. They are super comfortable — I fell asleep with them on yesterday morning — and the sound isolation and active noise cancelling is extremely effective. The battery life also goes way beyond wireless earbuds, but that’s to be expected. What I don’t like as much is the actual sound quality — it’s a bit meh, and though the Soundcore software offers more options than Samsung’s (*), no amount of monkeying with the EQ quite fixes it. Also, like their Bluetooth speaker, I feel like the max volume is way too much and so the volume control at the range I want (handled entirely on the phone) has steps that are too big. But I’ll stick with them a while and see if this is just a “get used to it” thing — and how I feel about them when going on a brisk walk. I might end up springing for some open earbuds (the kind where you don’t stick a silicone or foam tip in your ear canal at all). On the whole, those tend to be less good at noise cancellation and bass response though, so I don’t know whether I would be happier with the sound or not.

(*) it also has more notifications and feels more “in the way” than Samsung’s. They’re very obviously trying to build up brand loyalty and sort of gamify the whole thing and I don’t like that.

Something my spouse observed is that the in-between-size, on-ear rather than over-ear, wired headphones that were super common with the Walkman, Discman etc. and their clones just seem to not exist anymore. I wonder why that is — I think a lot of people would prefer them for everyday use rather than over-ear cans or in-the-ear buds. Isolation isn’t great but sound really wasn’t bad, and they’re light, cheap, and can be fairly comfortable.

After bailing out on that last book, now I’m reading Claire North’s Slow Gods, which is a strong candidate for favorite fiction of the year. I’m reminded of Ian Banks (especially The Hydrogen Sonata, which is my favorite of his) and Anne Leckie. They say science fiction is almost always a critique of the present — but in some stories it’s much more intentional and pointed and obvious, and this is one of those stories. The Shine is very much an unflattering but brutally honest mirror of the modern USA.

I’m listening to Wendy Carlos’ Digital Moonscapes this morning and realized… the appeal of her music to me, especially on this album and somewhat on the TRON score, is the kitsch. The Bach covers? Also kitsch, but I feel like there’s something about the way she composes that just can’t get away from it. There’s some appeal there and a personal style but… the kitsch is very strong here. The way the brass lines so often have that cartoonishly stereotypical dun-da-da-dunnnn fanfare, the overuse of whole tone scales, the way that melodic lines are passed between instruments including tympani that are played like a bass guitar and have extremely robotic 32nd-note rolls, the 1984-era General-MIDI-ass synthesized orchestra instruments. (*) I’d be curious to hear a real orchestra perform it to see how it changes the experience.

With Tomita… I grew up loving his stuff and I can still very much appreciate some of his sound design work and the overall, get-lost-in-the-music vibe he has sometimes. But the more kitschy aspects are somehow more cringey and less fun than with Carlos.

While I’m name-dropping electronic music pioneers, Jean-Michel Jarre has become a shill for AI. For me that’s an instant ticket to dismissing them as an artist (aided by my not really caring much for anything he’s done in the past 40 years). Equinoxe, Oxygene, and Rendez-vous had their enjoyable bits and Zoolook, which primarily was powered by abstract vocal samples and Marcus Miller’s slap bass with some help from Laurie Anderson chewing scenery in a fake language, is still kind of fascinating. Kitsch was certainly an element in those too.

Tangerine Dream though? I don’t feel like they were particularly kitschy until they went full stride into their digital age with Optical Race. (Another album I appreciate for its goofy earnestness.) Hmm.

(*) Actually the Crumar GDS, a rare additive/FM synth similar to the Synclavier but with no sampling, and the almost equally obscure Digital Keyboards Synergy which was a cheaper version of the GDS. Not awful machines for their age, just… they sound like a Sound Blaster card or a Playstation 1 when you try to recreate most acoustic instruments with them.

the stupidity is painful

I just said in my last post I wasn’t recommending The Vagus Nerve Reset, but now I super extra don’t recommend it. I encountered this last night:

It’s a tuning reference value. If you listened to music at 432Hz, it would be a sine wave drone. I like drone music, but I and most other people would be quite irritated by it after a few seconds.
The whole 432Hz tuning thing was based on a really flawed, small study that claimed that participants who listened to music where the instruments tuned to an A432 reference pitch, instead of the international standard of A440, had lower heart rates afterward. This hasn’t been replicated by larger, more rigorous studies.

Also, Verdi wrote that he would rather go with 432Hz because it was slightly easier for singers to reach high notes if the overall tuning is a little lower. But for most of the history of Western music there was no standard, or different orchestras/halls/composers used different standards probably due to variances in the tuning of pitchforks / pitch pipes. Mozart reportedly expected A=421 Hz. 440 was chosen because it matched a couple of cities and was close to others and because it’s a number easily divisible by a lot of stuff — it’s completely arbitrary, as is 432.

And why does tuning refer to A above middle C, specifically? Because the four stringed instruments in a Western orchestra all have open A strings. The oboe tunes with a fork, pipe or electronic tuner and everyone else tunes to the oboe. Why the oboe? There are lots of wrong reasons people give, but the real reason is tradition. Something I encountered as a student violinist is, after a few years of that, I could hear that A440 (or close to it) in my head as an oboe tone, and I don’t even have perfect pitch.

But as with many other things, some people latched onto that flawed study, broke out the numerology and astrology and whatever else they could get their imaginations around, and decided that 432Hz is “the frequency of the universe” or especially favored by Pythagoras etc. (*) And furthermore, because 440 was a German standard, it must have been a secret Nazi plot to demoralize their enemies with anxiety and depression.

* (Pythagoras lived 1500 years before a Persian scholar invented the second. 600 years later, an astronomer came up with a standard way to measure a second. In 1950 and 1967, the standard was updated to remove references to the length of the year, because that’s not constant. The scientific standard is based on “the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the cesium-133 atom” which is 9,192,631,770 Hz.)
Hz (Hertz, after physicist Heinrich Hertz) is cycles per second. 432Hz is… 8Hz lower than 440Hz, not 100. Frequency in Hertz is exponential compared to pitch — to go up an octave you double the frequency. You could extend that 8 Hz difference to 100 Hz by multiplying the frequency by 12.5. 440 * 12.5 = 5500, 432 * 12.5 = 5400. 5500 Hz is a rather flat F8, a bit above the range of a piccolo. There’s not a lot of music written for that range.

I have to wonder how much the author used AI to write the book — either directly, or for “research”. Or maybe it was just human ignorance and failure to do decent research. Given that the book explains polyvagal theory (and doesn’t mention that it’s not at all on firm scientific ground) I’m now questioning pretty much everything in the book. I suppose I’ll keep reading, skeptical of all of it, in case there’s something practically useful in it. It did introduce me to “glimmers” which are sort of a positive version of “triggers”, anyway.

While I’m quoting stupid things…

Brianna Wu is a trans woman who is very much a transmedicalist gatekeeper and a “fuck you I’ve got mine” sort. She is not an ally, any more than Caitlin “wah my passport now says I’m male but I still love Trump” Jenner is an ally. And now Wu has descended into advocating genocide by eugenics:

Thought experiment #1: if you replaced the word “transsexual” in the first sentence with “autistic”, “deaf”, “Black”, “Jewish”, “left-handed”, “short”, “unattractive”, “nerdy” etc. how does it sound? Exactly as Nazi as it sounds now, right?

I had an emotionally rocky childhood and that was as a white, ostensibly male kid with great parents, who didn’t even know what “trans” was. I was fat and nerdy and sensitive and anxious and not into much mainstream stuff. Kids can be cruel, and the pressure to punish nonconformity of any kind is strong. My answer to that certainly isn’t “abort all the weird kids before other kids have a chance to be mean.”

Thought experiment #2: what if, and I know this sounds crazy, people just stop inflicting needless suffering and abuse on trans kids (and adults)? Stop obsessing over what’s in other peoples’ pants and just treat them like human beings? Maybe follow the WPATH guidance and all the other medical science instead of the transphobic agenda?

RNG

I didn’t mention it before, but I’ve given up on the Zenowell Luna. I just can’t consistently find the right positioning and combination of water and gel to get it to conduct well and give me the right sensation… usually it’s nothing, sometimes it’s an irritating prickle. And I have no real evidence it was relaxing me.

I tried a “bee breathing” (Bhramari Pranayama) meditation and it was kind of weird, but that night I got some excellent sleep and my HRV was a little bit higher (21 instead of more like 16). The next morning I did it more, and my average HRV was a whopping 56! So I thought, maybe I’ve got something here. But I haven’t been able to replicate it. One important difference is the temperature in the house was fairly chilly — we hadn’t switched from AC back to heat because we weren’t expecting that much of a drop in temps. So maybe that was the entire difference. Cooler temps (down to some point) are supposed to be better for sleeping, after all.

I’ve seen that meditation before, but tried it because it’s in The Vagus Nerve Reset. But I’m not ready to recommend that book, because it goes along with polyvagal theory (which involves some not very good science; yes the vagus nerve is important in regulating stress/calm but there’s no evidence for some of the claims in the theory) and because the wording of the exercise was vague; to really understand how to do it I had to resort to YouTube videos. The book is also more focused on trauma than general anxiety etc.

Yesterday as I was leaving work, the silicone tip for my earbuds came off in my right ear and got good and stuck. I had to drive home so my spouse could help me get it out with a pair of tweezers. Not a pleasant experience. This isn’t the first time the earbud came out and the tip didn’t, but it was already partway out before and not nearly so troublesome. I decided to go for some replacement tips, and chose Symbio W for its silicone-coated foam, which apparently some people favor both for comfort and sound. I’ll find out soon enough.

I don’t know what got me thinking of this the other day, but I think I’ve realized why the internet isn’t “the information superhighway” anymore. Okay, four reasons: 1) it was never a good metaphor, 2) it’s unnecessarily long, 3) everyone was tired of hearing it, and 4) the internet stopped primarily being about information.

The internet really is about different things depending on who you are — it’s primarily about vacuuming up data and selling it to advertisers and governments, for the big tech types. But for the most part “content” has replaced “information.” There is probably more misinformation, disinformation, and non-information than information out there now.

And I had a flashback to how school libraries, in the age when they were relevant to me, had been rebranded “media centers” because apparently books just weren’t the future. It was all going to be microfilm/microfiche and films and recordings and maybe even involve computers someday somehow. 🙂 But “library” has the Latin word “liber” at its core, which is perfectly both “book” and “freedom”…

The long-awaited u-he Zebra 3 was released yesterday and… I’m not even looking at it. I made that decision at the end of last year and I’m sticking to it. I have enough stuff to work with, some of it’s pretty new to me still, and Zebra is a Very Big Deal that one could go really deep with, and I just don’t need that in my life. Maybe another time. I’m reserving my one synth plugin slot for the year for something smaller and more specialized, along the lines of Sine Machine.

I did wind up going for AudioThing Octaves, as one of the three FX plugins I’m allowing myself. It’s an emulation of a specific old-school passive bandpass filter than Hainbach likes, plus some extra features to turn it into a resonant filterbank. It sounded gorgeous in my testing, and it’s cheap.

I finally have the beginnings of work on the next album. Not a recording yet but a software patch and a plan to add some stuff to it. I just need to put in the time, when the focus and energy for it are there and I’m not lured away by walking in nice weather, playing Guild Wars 2, or a birthday dinner for a family member.

Speaking of GW2: I released my second Ranger from service, and finally got around to starting a Mechanist… which I’ve been avoiding because of the large numbers of weird green mecha-leading folks in the game. But now I understand the appeal. While some characters are really good at, say, heavy single target damage, cleaning up trash mobs rapidly, or sheer survival, these have it all while also being ridiculously easy to play the entire time. The big green thing zooming rudely through the camera’s near plane on a regular basis and standing in the way of things when doing “town stuff” with NPCs is still pretty obnoxious though.

calibrating…

After having about three frustrating days with higher blood sugar, I decided to go for the Dexcom Stelo. It’s an over-the-counter version of their continuous blood glucose monitor, a “patch” (with a small needle) that lasts for 15 days and transmits readings to a phone app. I’m told that hardware-wise it is identical to their G7, which is a prescription-only version, but for regulatory reasons the Stelo is “not intended for diabetics on insulin.” Okay whatever.

What I’ve been doing recently is checking my blood sugar before each meal, and deciding based on the reading and what I’m about to eat whether to take fast-acting insulin, and how much. So, three data points per day, with a process that can be awkward and sometimes a bit painful.

From Stelo, I get updated readings every few minutes. I can see when and how much my blood sugar dips in mid-morning. I can get a notification if it starts to spike because I’ve had too many carbs and not enough insulin — information I might otherwise miss because it might normalize before the next meal. I can see what it does while I’m sleeping, and how it responds to activity. I can make more informed decisions.

Integration with Oura (which was pretty much why I thought of trying this) is seamless and lets me correlate glucose with the other health data.

(None of this is useful to people without diabetes or prediabetes, according to dieticians and endocrinologists, despite claims from Dexcom and Oura and influencers. But it’s stuff I wish I knew years ago. For a diabetic, the two goals are to keep the overall average from being too high, and to keep things as even as possible without extreme highs and lows. A1C only measures the first… and managing the second can also help with the first as well as reducing hunger and keeping up a good energy level.)

I got a 2-pack, figuring that a month would be enough to either:

stop using it when those are done, having learned some things I can use in the future.
~~decide that it’s not that useful, but with a relatively small investment.~~ (It’s already proven itself useful.)
get a subscription and keep using it, hopefully reducing my need for finger stick tests.

Accuracy wasn’t amazing yesterday, reading about 20 points higher than finger sticks (except during a spike) — but still good for showing overall trends. Dexcom does say that’s expected on the first day. But this morning it was within 1 point of a finger stick, which is pretty great.

I finished reading that massive, weighty tome Full Catastrophe Living. Overall… I think I would recommend Fully Present over it, because it’s a much more reasonable size. If you want to read FCL, I think the first 40-50% or so that outlines the various meditation/yoga practices is best, and then any chapters from the rest of the book which might specifically apply to or interest you. The meditation techniques and overall theory are certainly covered elsewhere, though perhaps in less detail.

And I started but didn’t finish How We’d Talk if the English Had Won in 1066. I was expecting more humor and general geeky fun. Instead, it was extremely tedious. This is the third book I’ve set aside unfinished this year.

Now I’m reading T. Kingfisher’s Hemlock and Silver, which is WAY more entertaining. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read from this author, though this might be the funniest one yet. I’m going to have to grab the rest of her works, I think.

troubles

I haven’t gotten back to music-making mode yet or in-depth exploration of the new stuff. I did try out a couple of plugins, haven’t committed to anything yet though.

Audiority released free Pyros Versio firmware, based on its Pyros plugin. I was all excited to give it a try, thinking it might be competition for Lacrima Versio. But then I checked out the original plugin, which is an older one that escaped my notice, and… it’s quite good. I like the additional options and potential subtlety/control of the plugin more than the idea of heavier modulation or hardware location (*) in the firmware. But I think I might wait for a sale and to see if I change my mind.

Node Audio has a new microtuning plugin, Pitch Grid. More structured than Entonal Studio, it’s all about the 2D lattice, which is a part of the theory I still don’t quite grasp but it’s helping me appreciate it a bit more. You can stretch the octave/equave with one knob, and skew the tuning with another, using it to align your scale with markers on a pitch ruler that are calibrated to JI, the harmonic series or an EDO scale. There’s a button to optimize the stretch and skew to make selected intervals as in tune as possible, which quickly generates compromises such as meantone scales, perfect triads but stretched octaves, etc. It’s also helping me understand how limits work in Just Intonation on a more practical level. It emphasizes mapping a piano keyboard (or arbitrary number of notes per octave/equave) to a tuning, with a knob for a mode offset. Very nice. But there’s a bug where it destroys MPE pressure data, which is super important to me… so I’m holding out for that to be fixed.

The other stuff I’ve tried has been easy to say “meh” to.

My mother-in-law had a serious health issue last week and had to spend a few days in the hospital. Now her mother in a tiny town in northern Missouri is in the hospital, with a heart issue and complications, and she’s in no condition to drive up from Louisiana for a visit. My spouse might go down and pick her up, but is waiting for the word. (Update: she’s been discharged and is at home now.)

We got the official diagnosis on my dad. He’s got frontotemporal dementia (FTD), from a buildup of the tau protein in the brain. Like Alzheimer’s and most kinds of dementia, there is not currently any cure, though there are meds that may slow the progression, and he’s on one.

FTD is more of a group of diseases, rather than a specific one with a single fixed set of symptoms. Information about it often talks about trouble with language, behavior changes, lack of empathy, and inappropriate behavior. But the main symptoms my dad has is trouble with memory (both failure to remember, and “remembering” events that never happened), general confusion, and making even simple decisions. He also has trouble with writing, though reading is okay and speaking/understanding people is fine. He seems generally happy and makes goofy jokes just like he always did, and if he’s had any change in his personality, he’s mellowed a bit and gotten a bit less inappropriate. He does sometimes notice some detail and then fixate on it, and sometimes false memories form around them — like a recent story about “black blobs of tar” left on a neighbor’s roof from some dispute between two roofing companies, which were just normal attic vents. He’s definitely reliant on my mom for a lot of daily life stuff, and that does put a lot of pressure on her.

As for my own health recently… blood sugar is going okay, with some days where all three pre-meal readings are below 100 or at least below 120, and some days where a couple of them might reach the low 130s. Taking less insulin makes my appetite easier to manage. Also, small quantities of nuts (peanuts, walnuts, occasionally pistachios) are a good, satisfying snack, as are small tomatoes or boiled eggs. Belvita cookies (not to be confused with Velveeta) for breakfast don’t spike blood sugar and do tend to be satisfying, although homemade bread seems OK too in moderation.

On the mental side, my calm certainly has been challenged by Trump and his threats of war crimes and genocide that hinted at a nuclear strike. It was another TACO Tuesday (Trump Always Chickens Out)… or was it all meant to manipulate the market, so he and his cronies could buy low during a bullshit panic and then sell after the stock market recovered on the news of a bullshit ceasefire? Regardless, I’m at least glad the doomsday devices are still sitting in their silos. But there isn’t exactly peace or stability either.

Trump started a needless, useless war with no goals, then seemed to set the goal of fixing the trouble that he started and he isn’t even getting that right. He’s succeeded in bombing a girl’s school, a “double-tap” strike on a bridge to kill the rescue crews who came to aid wounded civilians, the deaths of several US soldiers and severe damage to US military bases and allied bases, losing a whole bunch of aircraft, depleting US munitions, withdrawing some of the watch on North Korea, destroying a whole bunch of oil and infrastructure, disrupting global trade, ending sanctions on Russia, Iran charging new fees on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and showing everyone (who didn’t realize it already) just how low he is willing to go and how crazy he is. There are Republicans calling for his impeachment… although of course not the ones currently in office. A lot of former MAGA types and right-wing talking anuses have turned against him over this. There are articles of impeachment out for Hegseth too.

Maybe this will finally be the thing that ends his career and that of his flunkies. One can only hope it does so before even worse war crimes, tragedies and self-owns happen. He still has the nuclear codes. But how often have we heard “Republicans in disarray!” and “Trump is losing his support” and “rats fleeing the sinking ship” and all of that, and yet they’re back kissing his ass, covering for his crimes and blunders, and supporting his lies 48 hours later?

Anyway, this was supposed to be about my anxiety… I held on. I was worried but didn’t panic, I was a bit stressed but didn’t lose it, I got mad but I didn’t freak out. I’d really rather not face real-world existential threats as a test of my coping skills though.