ketchup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have opinions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fresh

Whenever I release an album, I experience a sort of sadness. In some sense it’s disappointment in the lack of attention — even knowing rationally that I make weird soundscapey ambientish drone music and I do zero actual marketing. I also know that the person who cares the most about a piece of music/art is nearly always the person who actually made it. And every time, any insecurity I might feel about it is immediately shut down when I remind myself, I like it and know it’s good, at least to someone with my particular tastes; I’d truly rather listen to my own releases than most of what’s on the radio.

This time I was a bit extra worried, since I kept it at the recommended minimum price instead of setting it to $0, and it had the trans rights message. But I’ve sold a few copies (including some that don’t show up as “supported” on Bandcamp, presumably because of users’ privacy settings) and every comment I’ve gotten on both the music and the message has been great. So overall I’m pretty pleased.

I think for my next project I am going to feature the bass guitar. I’m not a great player by any means, but I can noodle a bit and can certainly process the sound, using the strings as oscillators in a weird hybrid modular synth. Since I’ve featured other kinds of gear in the past, why not this too?

Bitwig 5.3, long in beta, was released while I was finishing the last couple of tracks of the album, and I didn’t want to install it and disrupt things.

Now that the way is clear, I went for it and played with the new features. This is the “Nice Drums!” update but I’m indifferent to the new drums.

There’s also a new master recorder, which just records everything live to a file independently of the transport, which is (theoretically) right up my alley. I’ve been using a goofy workaround to record live audio. I think there may be a slight UI bug if you don’t have the browser panel already open when you start recording, but I figured out workarounds.

The really cool things though are three new Grid modules: Freq Shift+, Pitch Shift, and Dome Filter (plus a Freq Shift+ device outside the grid). A frequency shifter is inharmonic, creating ringy new textures and behaving similarly to a ring modulator (this is what Xaoc Koszalin does). The pitch shifter here is granular and can be MIDI-controlled, making it trivial to create the EXACT thing I was wishing for the other day: a software synth that can take an audio signal and polyphonically repitch it in real time.

In this example I’m letting Braids drone in VCV Rack, using Poly Grid to split MPE notes to as many voices as I like, pitch shifting each and using the pressure to control a VCA. There’s no reason I couldn’t route a hardware sound source to it instead though. Also, the Voice Stacking feature works, so I can layer multiple Pitch Shift instances using different grain rates for instance. It’s pretty magical, and a distinctly different sort of modular patching than Eurorack. It absolutely does color the sound a lot, but it’s pretty interesting nonetheless.

The dome filter (or Hilbert Transform) is an odd one. The math is well beyond me, but somehow it splits an audio signal into real and imaginary number versions of itself, along with (in this case) amplitude and phase signals. All I know is, I can mess with the phase signal, then multiply it back with the amplitude signal and get some kind of waveshaping as a result. Or use the phase signal to modulate another filter or something.

I’d be writing about that Nearness module I ordered too, except the day after it arrived in St. Louis, it got sent off to Los Angeles instead of my neighborhood post office. Typical USPS incompetence.

released: And Yet…

The new album is released, and notes are here.

I just got my passport card in the mail. They did indeed put “Sex: M” on it. This is technically correct, since they insist on having sex rather than gender on it. They haven’t done me nearly as dirty as they have a lot of trans folks.

I’m still not sure why the government cares so much about which type of half-formed genitals a person had when they were an infant. It doesn’t seem like it should be relevant to anything except for nefarious purposes.

Card goes in sleeve. Sleeve goes back in envelope. Envelope goes in drawer. Middle finger goes up. Another donation goes to the ACLU.

In our front yard, there’s what would be a bit of a hill if it hadn’t been leveled off into three tiers with knee-high concrete block retaining walls. The lower level of these developed a bit of a tilt over the past several months, and was one of the things we were going to have addressed after other concerns. But a corner of it collapsed onto the sidewalk, and it’s become the priority.

These sorts of walls — in much larger sizes — are supposed to last 50-100 years or more if engineered correctly (mostly, the wall needs to go down far enough to not be shoved upward by frost, and there needs to be sufficient drainage). I’m not sure how old this one is, but the blocks are identical to ones currently sold by Home Depot, so the answer could be “about 15 years.” Wouldn’t be the first thing that the house flipper half-assed.

My hope is that wall can be rebuilt without having to dismantle tiers above it. That will make a huge difference in the cost. I used the contact form for the most likely company I found based on some reviews; hopefully they will get back to me soon.

I’ve been interleaving the Moomin books between other reads. I’m through five of them at this point, and… hm.

I would still place Moonvalley in November — the one I read a few years ago, and the last of this set — at the top of the list. It had maximum Snufkin. Snufkin is a wanderer, a lover of nature and of music, a friend to Moomintroll and all small beasts, a foe of cops and park rangers. He’s a sort of Diogenes figure, or Thoreau without quite so much privilege.

Comet in Moominland, the first of this set, is probably second.

A lot of what goes on in the other books is just sort of random. There are beautiful moments and thoughts in them — often but not always delivered by Snufkin. Being Finnish, these are not all bright rays of sunshine all the time; there are natural disasters, and no shying away from depression.

Moominland Midwinter might be the darkest. Moomins normally hibernate through the winter, but one year Moomintroll wakes up, can’t go back to sleep, and is all alone (with his family and friends all soundly sleeping or traveling). When he starts meeting other people, they’re strangers and this makes him even more lonely. The sun won’t rise at all for weeks. He’s depressed, and even angry in a surprisingly realistic way. The personification of Winter comes along and touches a ditzy squirrel, killing it, and they hold a funeral and bury its stiff frozen corpse. Children’s book, remember!

Most recently I’ve started reading Body Neutral by Jessi Kneeland. I wasn’t sure about this one when I bought it, but just from the introduction, I am eager to read the rest. The author once worked as a personal trainer for already conventionally beautiful people, mostly women, many of them actresses or models, who were obsessed with perceived flaws. Jessi took a journey through “body positivity” before realizing it had been co-opted from a more political movement meant to be inclusive of disabled, black, trans and other less privileged bodies. Through working with a nonbinary client, they realized that they, too, were nonbinary. They became more interested in the justice angle, and also came around to promoting “body neutrality” — not the failed “love your body despite its flaws” but de-emphasizing the importance of beauty and conformity to self-worth in the first place.

The writing’s been pretty engaging just in this first chapter, and… the book might be less dark and depressing than the children’s books I have been reading to try to inject a little levity. Heh.

vexillological vexation

To be quite honest, I think the nonbinary pride flag is ugly. 3/10.

Symbolically, it’s pretty solid. Yellow represents genders that are off the masculine/feminine axis. White represents pangender/all genders. Purple represents a blend of masculine red and feminine blue. Black represents agender/no gender.

But it’s a graphic design nightmare. Just try putting some white text over it. Or black text. Or making text itself that’s in these colors. It’s gaudy and there’s extreme contrast. It violates the ancient ironclad rule of European heraldry that you never put “metal upon metal” — white next to yellow — for reasons of legibility.

I have seen these colors used tastefully — a sunrise/sunset scene in the mountains for instance, or accents of purple, white, and/or yellow with black clothing. But it’s a challenge.

But the transgender flag is… really nice! I appreciate the symmetry. The colors are complimentary, and there’s just enough contrast difference without it being glaring. It’s legible even in a tiny form, such as the official emoji 🏳️‍⚧️. You can put dark text over it, no problem. 10/10.

Blue is for transmasculine people, pink for transfeminine, and white can be either for other gender identities or those who are in the midst of transition. That’s pretty good symbolism too.

Then there’s this one which combines the trans and nonbinary flags. It’s a nice sentiment. It still has problems (including the white on yellow), but adding more colors kind of softens the blow a bit, maybe? 5/10.

wrapping up

The next album is now just short of 63 minutes long, so I’m declaring the recording process done. I’m pretty happy with the sound and feel of it overall, and there are some moments that I happen to think are particularly excellent. Time for mastering, art, and notes.

…and picking a title. I have 10 song titles and a general theme but I still don’t know what I’m going to call the thing overall. Petition to Launch Donald J. Trump Into the Sun With a Giant Trebuchet has a certain ring to it, except I don’t want that fucker’s name associated with my music. 😉

Silhouette has been great for me — it’s on 6 of the 7 tracks I recorded since getting it. Multimod is also amazing, used on the final two tracks, once for audio processing and once as a modulation source to swoop through several related sounds as well as using its Index output to sequence pitch. These modules are good companions for each other, and they both were designed with an open-ended, non-prescriptive creative vision.

With Silhouette, you can kind of see an obvious connection to other Whimsical Raps modules, particularly Just Friends (six outs from JF -> six ins on Silhouette). Multimod is a bit more of an outlier for Make Noise. Many of their modules do have a fair number of targets for modulation, but they’re not particularly parallel ones like, for instance, Silhouette’s multiple inputs or the level controls of a harmonic oscillator or a fixed filterbank or a polyphonic bank of VCOs. But then, the heart of the design for the module was to do something with many, many uses but no clearly obvious intention, to encourage the musician toward creative uses. Having 8 related outputs is almost like calling Marty McFly chicken, just to see what he’ll do.

That said, I’m thinking about that parallelism. And about granular synthesis — because if you run audio through Multimod, it becomes almost a kind of granular processor where each grain is a separate output. Merging them together in Silhouette is satisfying, but so is merely mixing them back together but perhaps in different places in the stereo field, or branching out to different processing. And if you have this rolling cascade of the same signal with different phases, a natural thing to want to do (if you’re me) is use them to open different VCA channels with related audio signals. The notes of a chord or harmonic series, for instance.

I can do that with the gear I have, but it’s awkward. Stereo is one thing, but if I have an octopus-load of audio signals to route into the DAW, that’s every input on my OptX used up. That leaves me with a mere 4 analog inputs that are easy to get to, plus the dedicated channels normally reserved for the Minibrute, bass-or-whatever, and stereo pair for Hypnosis. If I want to do the VCA thing in Bitwig, it also requires 8 channels of my Sweet Sixteen to convert those to MIDI CC. Which I did, but it was like the time I shoved a queen-sized futon mattress into the backseat of a Mitsubishi Lancer — there wasn’t a lot of room left for air.

I’m thinking about two things here. One is Nearness, a very simple, 2HP wide module with 9 jacks on it. The top and bottom are “left” and “right” outputs, and the 7 in the middle are panned L/R based entirely on proximity. (Of course you don’t have to use it for stereo, that’s just the obvious thing. You could pass it 7 gate patterns and get two complementary CV sequences from it.)

The other is the Doepfer A-130-8, which miraculously packs 8 VCAs (with no knobs) and three mix outputs (1-4, 5-8, and 1-8) into a single 6HP module.

My thinking earlier today was to replace my Xaoc Tallin and Mystic Circuits Ana 2 with these two — leaving a small space to be considered later. But after today’s recording, I realized that leaves me with almost zero utility VCAs for other purposes. I need to tread carefully and not rush anything. Meanwhile, I can rise to the McFly challenge and find less-parallel ways to work with the module (and continue to sacrifice much I/O the DAW when I choose that path).

Yesterday I got a notification from the State Department that my passport application was accepted and the card was being printed, and then shipped. Today I got a second notification that it was accepted, oddly enough. I don’t know if it never went on hold and was just slow, nor if it’s going through with “Gender = X” or “Sex = M” on it, or what. I hope not to have to use it regardless.

I’m reading Ink Blood Sister Scribe now, and was thrown off for a bit. It’s nearly set in our world, it’s just that there is a particularly difficult and rare and dangerous form of magic that requires writing books in ink made of one’s own blood. There’s a kind of conspiracy against people with this power. I’m sort of into it and sort of not; I don’t mind a good “hidden society of occultists in a familiar modern world” setting but this feels somehow like it was written by someone who’s not a fantasy author. I don’t especially love the writing style but I’m also intrigued enough to keep reading.

The shirts I bought from Geek Tropical arrived, and they’re great:

They look even better in person. That butterfly one is by Episodic Drawing, who has a lot of really gorgeous designs on the site. There are all kinds of other neat designs as well, it’s just that I really don’t need to collect a ton of button-up shirts. I do have two more I have reserved to put on a wishlist someday or wait for another sale, though.

real talk

Remember kids:

(From the instructions on a car/electronics vacuum I bought.)

I ordered cookies from a trans Girl Scout. Apparently the organization has been supporting trans girls and nonbinary kids for years now. It’s great to see this list and be able to support them as well as give a message of encouragement, while keeping them safe from harassment.

I’ve now recorded songs 5 days in a row. This feels pretty great after my dry spell. Arranged Coincidences was released on December 1, and then I went 58 days before my next recording. That technical study, the holidays and travel, illness, the allergic reaction to Trump, etc. meant music wasn’t happening. But I’m back. Or rather, as one of the song titles says, “still here.”

Album’s at 48 minutes now. I want to add one or two more tracks. My Make Noise Multimod just showed up, and we’ll see what kind of shenanigans that will drive this evening (haven’t played with it except to turn it on, but the LEDs sure are pretty). Silhouette has definitely led to some inspirations — it’s been in every track since it arrived. I’ve been using it to combine signals, drive motion and rhythm, add dirt and space, and play with feedback.

Things are generally more chaotic on this album (which I think fits with the times). In addition to Silhouette naturally leading to that, I’ve adopted its attitude with other sounds and modulation sources as well. In some ways this is a continuation of what I was doing with Tin Birds, but more so. There’s nothing Berlin School about this one. The opening sounds of the first track sound like a simple sequence, but it’s actually a sample of a 1950s sci-fi spaceship sound resynthesized in Dawesome Myth, with scan speed changes as well as the sample’s contents combining into a spontaneous melody. There are multiple layers of sound — dripping, small animalistic sounds, something bumping clumsily into other objects in the sub-bass range, all before I even bring in additional voices which just blend in with it.

I just want to say again, a lot of this happens spontaneously as I’m patching. My subconscious is doing some work, but it’s overall kind of a psuedo-Taoist “let things take care of themselves” approach. I don’t overthink it until afterward. 🙂

One of the songs is named “The Beginning is Always the Hardest,” which comes from a fortune cookie that started with “Be patient” or “Don’t lose hope” or something like that, which very much applied to the current US administration. For no particular reason, I recalled that in the I Ching there’s a hexagram named “Difficulty at the Beginning” (it’s not like I have all of them memorized…) One might think this name would place it first on the album, but I felt there was one that should be before it. And then the plan changed again, when I recorded the Myth-based one mentioned above, which demanded to be first regardless of name themes or the story of how these came about. So now “Beginning” is the third track. As it turns out, “Difficulty at the Beginning” is Hexagram 3.

Some incense from India and elsewhere is made with cow dung, or uses artificial scents. Dung has been burned as fuel by people for centuries, it’s not particularly weird. But this is unsuitable in my religion, which uses incense (A) to purify the air and (B) as an offering. One doesn’t clean things with poop, nor give poop as a gift.

So, most of us turn to Japanese traditional incense — no dung, mostly natural ingredients, less smoke. Nippon Kodo is one of the best known brands, especially their Morningstar line which is cheap, relatively common worldwide, and still quite good quality. (Their “musk” does use artificial synthesized fragrance but isn’t something I would have chosen anyway.) They also have excellent mid-range incense and pricier luxury stuff as well.

The one that always went over the best in my shrine was this:

It’s lovely and more sharp and spicy than a lot of sandalwood incense tends to be. I have been using it sparingly but finally burned the last stick. I didn’t even know it was discontinued — I can’t even find information on it (at least, not in this packging). There is, confusingly, a store named Tendan which sells Nippon Kodo incense, but not this.

However, I’ve been able to find this package at several places, just not directly from the NK shop:

“Tendan Old Temple Meiko Spicy Sandalwood Incense” — Mysore sandalwood with cinnamon, spikenard and benzoin. That sounds like it could be it! These are boxes of 300 sticks for $29, not bad at all. So even though I have literally thousands of Japanese incense sticks from wanting to try all different kinds, I’m placing an order. Unfortunately the shop I’m buying it from only has ONE box left. There are 300 sticks, but if this turns out to be The One, I might have to find another one elsewhere.

Because the shipping isn’t cheap and I might as well make the most of it, I’m also grabbing some Baeido Kobunboku incense, which is another sandalwood blend that comes highly recommended, as well as a hinoki-mint blend.

I read Imogen Binnie’s novel Nevada in two days. This is “a road trip novel that refuses to go anywhere” and tells the story of a trans woman who’s a loser, going on a road trip either to figure her shit out or to escape it, and meets a guy who’s even more of a loser who she thinks is an “egg” (trans person who hasn’t realized it yet). She tries to talk to him about it. The whole think is awkward, messy, I don’t really want to say “gritty” but kind of like that. And relatable, even though I’m not a stoner, never lived in New York or a horrible little cowtown, am nonbinary rather than a trans woman, and only figured it out later in life.

James, like me, encountered the idea of “autogynephilia” online and kind of went “that’s me” — even though it wasn’t quite! I think that may have been a common pitfall for people who weren’t quite cisgender but also didn’t experience dysphoria, early in this century. As Maria pointed out to him, “autogynephilia” was part of an awful narrative about trans women which (intentionally? ignorantly? both?) confused gender, sexuality, and fetishism.

The book leaves a lot unresolved. Does James actually take anything Maria says to heart? Is James actually trans or was Maria off base?

And so when I put the book down, I had to have a good think. Again: am I really nonbinary? Or a trans woman in denial/fear of transition (the process, the stigma, not getting the results I want, etc.)? I went to shrine contemplating this, figuring I’d be writing several pen-and-paper journal pages but I had my answer before I even started writing — the same answer I got in shrine 13 years ago. My gender is “a thing of borders”, I was made that way on purpose, and I am whole and complete. But also some of the way I have been thinking of it has been an oversimplification and I owe myself a bit more contemplation at some point.

hey AshurbaniPAL…

I finished that book on Inanna. It is, basically, a beautiful translation of the myth of Inanna and the Huluppu-tree, Inanana and Enki, the Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi, Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld, and seven hymns. A little bit of commentary about Sumerian and Akkadian culture. But there’s actually nothing at all about the potentially trans/nonbinary people in her priesthood.

In the Descent myth, Enki (the god of wisdom) fashions two “creatures of no gender”, kurgarra and galatur, from the dirt beneath his fingernails, and sent them to sympathize with Ereshkigal’s pains to convince her to give up the captured body of Inanna. That’s in the book. But not in the book: these were the names of priestly callings. Galatur were composers and singers of mourning songs, dressing in feminine clothing, taking feminine names and singing/speaking in a feminine dialect; there’s a line about Inanna having changed them from men into women to strike awe into the people. Kurgarra were leaders of processionals and specialists in protective magics, apparently holding both masculine weapons and symbols of a feminine role, and the either An or Inanna had transformed them as well.

Again, I’m not going to attempt to hold up Sumer as a utopia for trans and nonbinary people. Simply that the oldest recorded human history does in fact include people whose gender doesn’t fit in one of two tidy little boxes. That “radical gender ideology” as a certain felon called it, is at least two millennia older than the Bible (and least four millennia if you’re looking at the cult of Inanna in general during the Uruk period, rather than the date of this particular writing).

I finished watching season two of Arcane. While they stopped leaning quite so heavily on music videos, the story — already a tangled mess of conspiracies, murders, terrorism, family bonds, romantic bonds, betrayal of both of those, illusion and magic — just got increasingly, cosmically, “we’re going to do five minutes of psychedelic special effects instead of explaining any of this and then have entire episodes in alternate timelines” weird. There were certainly some very emotionally stirring episodes and moments, and like I said before, the show consistently looks gorgeous. But overall, I just don’t know. No regrets in having watched it, but I can’t really call it a masterpiece either.

To prevent myself from maxing out my vacation days, I took Friday and Monday off work. I recorded songs on both Thursday and Friday, and will probably do some more today. That’s 31 minutes of music so far.

My spouse had the idea of taking my parents to the St. Louis Aquarium and a nice meal on one of these days, when they’d be less likely to be crowded. But Valentine’s Day isn’t great for restaurants — in fact we tried to go to Mimi’s last night, thinking about how it’s rarely got more than a handful of customers when it’s not Sunday brunch, and there was a waiting list. People with reservations were waiting quite some time, mainly in parties of two, so after maybe an hour’s wait we gave up. Old Spaghetti Factory nearby was also packed full. We went to Culver’s instead.

The forecast for Monday is 11-22 degrees F (about -11 to -5 C) and some very light snow showers in the morning. Not the weather I’d have chosen for an outing, but we might go anyway.

That newest character I started in Guild Wars 2 is doing really well. I’ve soloed several Champions now, including some I had serious trouble with on previous characters. I did eat dirt a couple of times, through a combination of bad luck and overconfidence. But I’m convinced that high sustain condition builds are the way to go for a solo character. Between the poison/burning/torment etc. ticking away on enemies, and a couple of necromantic pets distracting them, I can keep the pressure on even while dodging or getting out of range to heal up. (Normally if you get outside an enemy’s range they immediately heal up to full so you can’t repeatedly hit-and-fade. They do the same if you attack enemies from positions where they can’t get to you — no sniping from an overhang or killing underwater creatures from dry land.)

(The camera in GW2 is totally reasonable for exploration and combat but not great for portraits.)

MAK NOS

Today’s new module announcement from Make Noise has me making a second change to my modular rack already.

The Multimod is a mere 10HP wide, meaning it can replace the Xaoc Koszalin that I just haven’t been using much (and which has pretty decent software equivalents, aside from the FM capabilities… and I have so much FM stuff in my rack it’s really not needed).

As for what it does? A couple of things.

It’s an 8-channel LFO (including stepped or smooth random), where all the channels share a common shape and can be synchronized or offset at different phases and rates. A bit similar in concept to Just Friends or Tides 2018.

But it can also capture incoming signals, record them into a buffer, and then play that buffer back using those shapes (forward, backwards, ping-pong, steppy, randomly rearranged, etc.) Again, with different rates and phases per output, synchronized or not, and with a variable buffer size. And the buffer input can be frozen so it just holds what’s already been recorded. Those signals can be from another LFO, sequencer, envelope, gates, controllers…

…or even audio. Meaning that you can use it as a multitap delay, pitch shifter, and looper, albeit a slightly crude lo-fi-ish one.

This is the sort of “time travel” thing I thought was awesome about the Red Panda Tensor pedal back when I had one, but way cooler and more capable. I’m excited!

just the outline

Whimsical Raps Silhouette arrived yesterday while I was at work, and I spent about 90 minutes playing with it. And then about 3 hours this morning while waiting for stuff to finish building at work.

The module consists of:

  • an input crossfader/selector (the big Spot knob) that scans through 6 inputs, and outputs them on the Light output. The LED display below Spot shows the actual position. The selected signal goes to the Light output (unaffected by any other controls)
  • The little grey knob, if you don’t patch anything to its input, is a built-in modulation source with a sort of “pause” in it. Unfortunately, it has a minimum speed faster than one might like, so you’ll have to patch an external source into the Spot CV input to go more slowly. And then you have to use a ramp at exactly the expected voltage range if you want it to travel in a continuous circle.
  • The All input goes into any unpatched inputs, but with alternating polarity. So as you sweep through Spot, the signal is cancelled and un-cancelled.
  • the selected signal also goes through a filtered BBD (controlled by the Focus knob) to the Shadow output. There’s no built-in feedback, you’re expected to patch that if you want it.
  • The Left/Right outputs also optionally include a reverb (the Blur knob).
  • With the output switch at Split, Spot rotates inputs around the stereo field in a circular manner, and silences them when it points directly at that input. The delayed signal isn’t present on the L/R inputs in this mode (without feedback patching).
  • With output set to Mix, it *also* mixes the Light and Shadow signals directly into the output — which covers that silent gap in the circle.
  • The Atmos switch controls different VCA behavior:
    – Level: the reverb is always present, and Lens controls the main signal level
    – Chain: dry and reverbed signals are sidechained by other input signals (affected by Spot)
    – Expand: the reverbed signal is ducked by the dry signal
  • All of this works with CV signals too, not just audio. So you can mix and distribute different modulation sources, and even (if you’re a bit crazy) affect them with delay/reverb.

The implications of all this are… quite a lot. You can use it for some basic mixing or an end-of-chain effect, or get very weird with feedback patches and make surprising sounds with only a couple of other modules (or just by itself really).

This is replacing Bunker Archeology in my case and I will have absolutely no regrets. In fact the kind of stuttering and reverb that BA did? This can also do that. Not exactly the same way of course, but still.

not by the hair of…

When I decided to shave off my beard, I had no idea how much more effort it would be, every day, to shave the chin, around the mouth and upper lip, compared to all the rest of the face. That area is complicated and not very flat, and spiky stubble can poke unpleasantly. Plus I have a lot more bluish beard shadow there than anywhere else.

I’ve tried multiple things so far to improve shaving. I’ve had some half-decent results but nothing super great, and it’s a bigger time commitment. So I’ve been considering alternatives.

None of those alternatives is growing the beard back though.

I actually bought some wax strips. But apparently they need 1/4 inch of hair to work, and that’s a long time to leave a lot of stubble. I just tried it after a mere 4 days of stubble (which I quite dislike) and it had basically zero effect other than making my face sticky until I cleaned it off with the provided wipes, and then it just smelled weird. 0/10 would not do again.

So I’m getting myself an at-home IPL device. There’s some up-front cost but considering how much razor cartridges (*) cost, in the long term it’s cheaper. IPL isn’t permanent but is pretty long-term, and you can always touch it up. I have the requisite light skin, and the beard hair I’m concerned with is dark enough that it should work well. Certainly it seems like a better choice for relatively sensitive skin than using an epilator (think: small combine harvester made of tweezers), or even shaving really.

(*) double-edged safety razor blades are cheaper, but they don’t *actually* shave closer than multi-blade cartridges. They just encourage people to slow down and learn better technique by necessity. And some people prefer the more old-fashioned methods.

I watched the first season of the Netflix series Arcane when it was pretty new. I don’t play League of Legends, but I don’t think I really missed anything important by coming into that universe cold. It was enjoyable, but it didn’t occur to me to catch up on season 2 until just yesterday when I found it too awkward to eat hot soup and read a paperback in a recliner at the same time.

One thing I didn’t like about the first season was… Imagine Dragons. I don’t actively dislike them, I just am not into them. They did the opening credits song, which I always skipped after the first episode… and then I was chagrined when one of the episodes basically had a music video for that song in its entirety. Feh.

Well, I’ve watched three episodes of season 2 and all three of them had music videos. Plus action scenes that were almost a second music video per episode (the music being mixed well above any other sounds and the action more or less synchronized to it). Some of these are better than others, in terms of how abstracted the storytelling is and how much it feels like a proper part of the episode rather than a kind of interruption. I’d really just rather they didn’t, though.

The visual styles (for there are a few, and they shift with context) are gorgeous and awesome — even though some of the weapons, clothing and equipment are videogame-level silly and impractical, and some of the intelligent races of people are very Jim Henson silly and feel out of place. Some of the characters are extremely cool though, and despite the punching and shooting and exploding and magical weirdness it’s still a very character-driven show. I’m enjoying it overall. I just groan when the music videos start.

Something I used to do on Instagram is post a collection of album covers whenever Bandcamp Friday rolled around and I acquired some music. Today they’re donating proceeds to LA fire recovery, so I picked out several things.

This is an album I had in my collection on Google Play Music, which means I never actually owned it and lost access to it when I cancelled my subscription. Basically, a chiptune and piano duo; they did some music for Steven Universe, and the album has a great cover of “Lonely Rolling Star” from the Katamari Damacy soundtrack.

If I remember right, this is someone who posted the link to their album on either the Lines or ModWiggler forums. Generally chill but not super ambient stuff.

Hiroshi Yoshimura was a pioneer of “environmental music” (kankyō ongaku) in Japan — starting before the US went through its brief New Age frenzy. The genre typically included nature recordings, birds and running water and so on, but this particularly album only had it in the US release, and this reissue is a remastered version of the Japanese original, full of FM sounds and a generally optimistic vibe.

Oren Ambarchi got his start with minimal ambient music with electric guitar, but this album moves into percussion (tuned and not), strings and pianos and sine waves and other things.

This is a composer and sound engineer trained in classical violin and Renaissance lute, turning them (plus processing) into something completely new and different.

I’m just going to call it techno. Berlin techno maybe, dark and heavy with an industrialized feel. But then I have trouble differentiating a lot of dance-oriented genres. Anyway, it’s good.

Alma Laprida plays the tromba marina, a medieval stringed instrument that’s four to seven feet long, processed with effects pedals and an overdriven 18-inch subwoofer and feedback. Whatever you imagine that sounds like, you’re probably wrong. It’s oddly delicate at times.

This is Ezra Buchla on the electric viola (with some overdrive and/or echo at times) and a looper. It’s absolutely lovely stuff!