March 294th.

It's about time to pause my job search for a couple weeks, as the industry tends to just hibernate until the new year. New job openings will appear, as everyone finalizes their 2021 headcount. It'll be fine.

Last night the Shitgibbon and his pet lunatics sat down in the Oval Office and discussed how to stage a coup, by physical force, using the military and everything. Attorneys on Twitter are now (re-?)acquainting themselves with the dust-caked federal crime of "seditious conspiracy," which seems to mostly get pulled out for terrorists (even white ones) because, let's be honest: it exceeds the ambition of most criminals. Unlike every other conspiracy charge, seditious conspiracy doesn't require you to have gone as far as to start your overthrow of the government or its laws, so this seems to qualify. Good times!

This is the first winter I've had a violin nice enough to really feel affected by the weather. Higher-end violins are built more lightly, so they can resonate more, which makes them more sensitive and harder to play, and also makes them more likely to disintegrate when rented to students (who are mostly kids). I also haven't particularly liked my rental violins, so it's a treat to have one I really enjoy. It's still a stupid instrument.

My violin teacher, already working remotely, and with finances only somewhat better than you'd expect for a Millennial musician, went down to Puerto Vallarta a few weeks ago. My first question was "Are you coming back?" and the question is open, but he's certainly ripe for the expat life. Absent the ability of the Bay Area to put you in a room with the right people, you might as well go someplace else.

(There's a famous Scottish fiddler named Alasdair Fraser, who actually lives relatively nearby here, and whose son Galen is also a local musician. Alasdair wrote a pair of tunes I learned in simplified form, but my teacher described being out at a jam session, and "Galen's Arrival" came up, and Galen said, "That's me! I'm Galen!" and of course the song was written for his birth. But there are no jam sessions.)

We're staying home. We should walk the dog more. We're all healthy, for the moment, but the pandemic is looking grimmer than ever.

One nice feature of a new job will be that I'll have less time to read Twitter.

March 288th.

The fascist coup has failed, this time around. We get a short grace period before fighting the next one. The Democratic Party establishment has not been doing shining work since the election: Biden has already made some deeply ungood Cabinet choices, and Pelosi started working on strategies to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory even before the fascists started filing lawsuits. The pre-2004 Red Sox would have recognized fellow travelers.

This magnificent trio of Scandinavian women performed this at Fiddle Tunes last year, and I've been lusting after it ever since:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RN1jUZF9Q90" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

It's written by Anna Lindblad (on the left there), inspired by the music and friendships she made at the Tønder Festival, but it's a Zydeco tune, like this one. It's on her album Med Vänner ("With Friends"), but the original is a complicated tapestry of many instruments, and I've wanted to pick apart this simpler version, but didn't have a good recording.

The job hunt is going well, I think. I'm grateful to not have to be in a rush. The downside is that I don't have a job, but I'm better situated for unemployment than at any other time in my life? It's worth it, to land in the right situation, and it will take a little time: one of my good friends said, "You're amazing at managing down and sideways, but not up. So if you're head of Engineering at a small company, that more or less takes managing up out of the equation." She's been in executive roles for a while now, and sure enough the one VP role I've been interviewing for so far is much more suited to me. So we'll see how that goes.

Eight months ago I would have said "Defund The Police" is a little extreme, but after seeing how thoroughly their only response to concerns about police violence is more violence, watching one after another police union president stand up and scream like an abusive alcoholic dad on a bender that we're all horrible people because we don't appreciate how much they do for us, hearing how they continue beating and killing citizens with impunity, well, sign me up.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">call me crazy but i&#39;m starting to think that it&#39;s bad that every city in america funds a small standing army of right-wing nutjobs that hates it</p>&mdash; Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li (@perdricof) <a href="https://twitter.com/perdricof/status/1322732916489756672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 1, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

The institution is rotten to the core, including liberal bastions like the Bay Area. Just dissolve every police department. I don't care if we have a replacement plan, although people do. We'll figure it out. It won't be worse than the status quo.

And that's our news, on this 288th day of March 2020. Good night, and good luck.

March 272th

We're all on the same calendar these days. 

Chris-Laptop :: ~ » march

Fri Mar 272 14:48:43 PST 2020

My job hunt continues. I'm learning a lot about interviewing for management roles, but haven't found the right match yet. I have good friends helping me out with the learned wisdom of their own careers. I'm watching slightly less TV, getting my head back into books. It's hard to get out of my head to connect with humans.

I can approximately measure my emotional bandwidth by how much I practice the violin. Centered, resilient, adaptable, able to cope with failure? Practice. Twitchy, frustrated, just want to hide under blankets until it's all over? The couch chains my soul.

(I can't play the violin while lounging. I know some people can, like Doug Kershaw, which boggles me every time I see it. Mark O'Connor, while an amazing musician, holds his violin the way the rest of us do.)

We're having a Thanksgiving so low-key as to be non-observant: Anna is recovering from eye surgery (it went fine, and her vision is already considerably better than mine), and we're not going anywhere, because it's still a pandemic and other people's behavior is terrifying. Even in California, where the liberal Democratic governor violated his own rules about gatherings, and now he and his family are dealing with possible COVID exposure. And San Mateo County is doing okayish. We have a large basket of privilege that we're exercising: extraordinarily good Internet connectivity actively monitored by a professional (me), jobs that let us stay home, solid finances, and the fact that most silly services like Instacart start here, so the coverage is good.

(Instacart has been one of the bizarre reversals this year, being one of those Silicon Valley things that targets young techies with the fawning idea that their time is far too valuable to be spent doing the few things Facebook or Google doesn't do for them, like grocery shopping or putting gas in the car–or, in the case of Soylent, eating. Now it's a very important tool for anyone eager to reduce their exposure to the outside world. Except it's part of the gig economy created by hollowing out of the middle class, so we're paying someone, who needs the money, to put their health on the line instead of ours. But would shopping ourselves change anything about the broader social situation we disagree with? There are no good answers, but in the meantime we tip heavily.)

I made bread again, using a recipe from Artisan Bread In 5 Minutes A Day, which I highly recommend. I was hoping to make something sandwich-friendly, but so far we've just been eating it by the slice.

I also made yogurt. We've been boycotting Trader Joe's, because they're aggressively anti-union, and failing to address constant COVID outbreaks on their staff. Unfortunately many of our favorite things are only available at Trader Joe's, including goat-milk yogurt, which our bodies are happier about, and has also been really good for the dog.

I didn't want to use the actual goat milk for it, but I do have powdered goat milk as part of the emergency rations, so I thought I'd give that a try. I ordered freeze-dried yogurt culture, but didn't want to wait, so I used some cow yogurt as an inoculant. I used our smaller Instant Pot: nearly all models have a Yogurt button, which doesn't pressurize, just keeps the milk at a constant temperature for the hours and hours needed.

It...mostly worked? The yogurt-ish end product is very liquid, but more noticeably, incredibly tart or tangy or sour. Maybe all three?

• Salt helps, but I dunno if we'll eat it.
• The dog doesn't care.
• It tastes like soup, because I didn't swap out the gasket for a clean one. Everyone always says that, but this is the first thing I've ever had absorb flavors. I guess I could have cleaned the Instant Pot itself more thoroughly.

And that's sort of it. We had mostly declined to participate in the reopening of everything, which turns out to have been wise, and now that everything is supposed to be shuttered again, we're...not changing anything, except to resume grocery delivery.

On we go, then.

less tentacles, more doom.

 I just finished Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, which is excellent, as is the TV series. (Ruff is a white man, and the series is done by a Black woman, and it shows.) The book ends with a delightful mini-interview.

What are your personal feelings about H. P. Lovecraft?

The story that best sums up Lovecraft for me is “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” It’s about a New England coastal town whose inhabitants have made an unholy alliance with aliens who live in the sea. A tourist comes to Innsmouth for the day, sees too much, and ends up running for his life.

All of Lovecraft’s worst traits are on display in the story: Besides the standard racist worldview, “Shadow” offers a thinly veiled allegory about the evils of miscegenation (the aliens are mating with the townspeople). But as a tale of steadily mounting dread, it works, and it’s one of the most effective portrayals of attempted lynching I’ve ever read. Lovecraft’s protagonist is white, but with just a few changes this could easily be the story of a black traveler caught in the wrong place after dark.

So for all his faults, Lovecraft was tapping into these universal themes of horror that resonate even if you’re not a white supremacist. I wish he’d been a better person, or blessed with better mentors. But as a storyteller, I can still learn from him.

There you go.

campfire vs. concert hall.

So the Variax is tons of fun, because I can pick it up and be playing one of a couple dozen different instruments, to the detriment of the Vivaldi concerto I'm learning on the violin. I plugged it in for my violin teacher, and fingerpicked a little bit on the acoustic sounds, and he squinted a little bit––the relatively few musical elements I can play on the guitar, I'm pretty good at––and asked how long I've been playing guitar (since he just picked it up, and may feel a bit like how I feel on the violin).

This is an interesting question, partly because it will be 30 years next year, and because that number means so much, and so little. On the one hand, I've been playing for so long that I can't help but feel comfortable with it; on the other, I've never really put in the time and effort to become truly good at it, playing scales, applying more than the most basic (by my standards) music theory, or generally challenging myself overmuch.

Enjoying the instrument doesn't demand that of you. It's the quintessential "learn 3 chords and now you're all set for the next few decades of playing around campfires" instrument. Or take the same 3 chords and start a band that adds so much volume and distortion that it doesn't even matter if you tune the guitar first.

Or you can put your all into it, and be Django Reinhardt, who, no joke, was a groundbreaking guitarist with the 2 fingers remaining on his left hand.

Or Tommy Emmanuel, for Pete's sake, learning how to play everything by ear on the radio, not knowing anything about multiple instruments, or guitar capos, or thumbpicks:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Wmr5_25oVDA" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I don't have that kind of dedication, but if you pick up a guitar and play E-minor enough times, it sticks.

I'm selling myself a little short here, because I do know two fingerpicking patterns that I've added variations for. Maybe this is the year I crack open that book and add a third. And I have a bunch of ebooks about playing blues, which I glance at periodically. Mostly I'm just fucking around?

The ugly truth is far worse: I'm actually a very good musician.

Ugh.

how did I get here?

 (From the Talking Heads song, which I cannot recommend highly enough.)

If you remember from a previous adventure, there's a device, usually a pedal switch on the floor, called a "looper," where you start it, play a phrase of music, and then it just plays that phrase over and over. Then you can play more phrases on top of that ("overdubbing") and create textured layers of sound, even if there's only one of you, like this guy:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dck6m5guuIE" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Loopers, like their sibling effects "Echo" and "Delay," started out as an actual loop of magnetic tape, and while they're all solid-state now, they've mostly kept the same user interface (UI) as the original tape loopers, because...I don't know why. A bizarre skeumorphism, maybe. And I hate it! You have to tap your foot exactly right, and sometimes you need a double-tap, and the number of taps and the LED light indicators are all mode-dependent, and it's horrible. There's no need to suffer like this: we have computers! I was resigned to getting a MIDI floor switch and figuring it all out myself, but then it turns out a few other, more motivated people have had the same opinion, and did all that work already.

The switch I ordered comes with programming to make it JFW (Just F*cking Work) with a venerable and fabulous music-making program called Ableton Live, and since the looper is backordered, I've been spending some time learning Ableton, and the tools and history of electronic/computer-driven music.

This is interesting because I've listened to a lot of electronic music over the years, and the first thing to really strike me is that the essence of electronica, long songs composed of patterns repeated with small changes applied gradually, is really a function of the hardware available in the 70s and early 80s. Synthesizers that couldn't yet sound like real instruments, and sequencers with very little memory that repeated patterns (necessarily short) on the synthesizers. I think that relatively few people had a sound in their head and invented equipment to produce it; instead, they met the equipment and thought, "What can I make with this?".

The challenge that I'm seeing now: how do you use these tools to make music that doesn't sound like all the electronically-driven music I've already heard?

It's a digression, in a way, since this started by wanting to loop violin and guitar parts, but Ableton Live was written by German artist-engineers as a performance tool (hence the "Live"), and in its UI and terminology, it actually treats ordinary studio recording as a special form of performance (which it is). But I'll need to know the app to get the most out of it, in any case.

Every so often I look up and realize the kind of rabbit-hole I'm in, and it's all because I hate the restrictions of a single type of musical hardware, that most non-guitarists wouldn't recognize anyway.

MOAR BOOKES

 I finished book 10 of the original Malazan Book of the Fallen series! They went down pretty smoothly, for totaling 3.3 million words. There are a few other series in that universe, but I have a backlog of other stuff I need to get to, neglected while the Malazan books occupied my brain. They are remarkable books, where the stories are really driven by a particularly gifted military, created from scratch by some particularly gifted individuals, and the underlying canvas of the plots is the complications and contradictions of those people in that situation. Can you imagine so much text about military experiences, written with unflinching honesty and empathy? The soldiers understand that they kill people for a living, but underneath that, a few are sociopaths, but most carry a load of compassion and kindness with them.

The "Book of the Fallen" refers to the book of soldiers who have died, rather than anything metaphorical or metaphysical. No disgraced angels here, just people who die, and the question of why soldiers end up in a career of soldiering, how they connect and relate, why they fight, and how they are changed by it all.

It's also a super complicated view of imperialism, because the remarkably successful Malazan Empire is dedicated to expansion, mostly by conquest, but:

• It's unclear why it's expansionist (and it was founded within living memory of the books' events, not shrouded in distant history).
• They administer conquered territory as integrated provinces, rather than colonies.
• The Malazan systems of law and justice are almost universally more fair and effective than whatever they displace.

Anyway. Amazing, long, amazing books. And now they're done.

we have to run out of burnable material at some point.

As we discovered with the fires of 2018, while we live in the middle of a giant megalopolis and don't need to worry about wildfires touching our house directly, it turns out that a sufficiently large fire, at any distance, can create a barely livable environment. The AQI measurement of air quality, which is normally 40ish on a bad day, has been above 200 all day, and generally miserable for a couple weeks now.

A surprise to everyone was fires exploding in Oregon, which is hardly immune from wildfires overall, but definitely hasn't seen anything like this in recorded history. The fires are reaching towards the Portland suburbs, and one of my minions at work had to evacuate the other day. So that's all terrible, and one wonders if the West, overall, is just not habitable in the relatively near term (5-10 years), which, if true, has dire implications for our secret plan to migrate up to the Pacific Northwest once the kids turn 18 in a couple years.

Another surprise has been that while we have thought, with the pandemic, that we haven't been leaving the house, it turns out that once we are staying inside because of unhealthy air, we learn that we were, in fact, leaving the house a lot more than "never," and that has been important for our mental health. Maslow's hierarchy of needs does not specifically call out "breathable air" at the bottom, it's sort of implied, but it does turn out to be more important than food or water.

Don't get me started on the anniversary of 9/11, when we, as a nation, truly lost our fucking minds.

Maybe I can sleep until, I dunno. December? Is December long enough?

INCOMING

 Okay, so I bought another instrument, but at least I made sure Anna knew about it first. What's the point of adulthood, if not to have fun where you can?

It's a weird sort of guitar I've had my eye on for a while, called a "modeling guitar" because it digitally models the sound of other instruments. Only one company, Line 6, makes such a thing, and they've been making emulators for decades. I already have a multi-effects unit of theirs, the M9, from when I bought an electric guitar, and realized I did not want to spend the time, money, or space on a billion different guitar pedals. People get very passionate about very specific guitar pedals or effects: to take one example from the list of effects in the M9, the Tape Echo effect is an echo based on the Maestro EP-3 Echoplex™, manufactured from 1970 to 1991. Do I care? Not really. I have only the vaguest of opinions about different kinds of distortion, and no opinions about quirkier stuff like phasers or reversers. I do know that my ambitions are simple and my space is limited.

I finally have the wheeled shelf I dreamed of, to get everything off the floor. The M9 is up top there. You can have 3 effects active at a time, with 6 different groupings available as "scenes," which I don't really use. For $150 (used) I get to experiment with dozens of effects, each of which individually would cost no less than $100. Behold, my complete lack of snobbery.

The M9 is not actually the height of Line 6's emulation skills. Now, the distinctive tones that have shaped every form of electrified music come from–not to put too fine a point on it–shitty hardware. Vacuum tubes and janky resistors and all kinds of elements that have nonlinear responses as they heat up or draw more current or whatever. In the higher-end Line 6 devices, they are emulating the old hardware at the circuit element level (emphasis mine):

HX Modeling accurately recreates the behavior of even the most idiosyncratic vintage effects by modeling their individual components. The Transtronic process emulates the behavior of virtually any germanium or silicon transistor diode, making it possible to authentically recreate fuzz, distortion, and other pedals once considered too persnickety to convincingly model. The Throbber is a "virtual lightbulb" that mimics the decidedly nonlinear behavior of the small incandescent bulb and four photocells inside the original 1960's Uni-Vibe pedals that are essential to their unique sound and vibe. And the Bucketier chip and Panda circuit are virtual recreations of the Bucket Brigade (BBD) chips and compander (compression/expansion) circuitry found in many old-school analog delay pedals. Accurately modeling the inherent quirkiness of vintage analog delay pedals at the component level endows HX analog delay effects with all of their lo-fi majesty.

They do it for amplifiers, too (a musician fetish I understand even less than with effects). It dawned on them some years ago that they could pull it off with a guitar: take a basic input from 6 individual strings, and output Eric Clapton's Fender Stratocaster, or B.B. King's custom Gibson ES-345, or Jimmy Page's  Gibson Les Paul.

(Trust me, those are all so radically different even I care about the distinction.)

For that matter, why not transform the signal into that of an acoustic guitar? A 12-string? A different tuning? (I mean, what you play on the strings won't be what comes out of the amp, but if it saves you from having a dozen differently-tuned guitars on-stage, that's okay.) Or a banjo, or a sitar.

Hence, the Variax, long described, quite accurately, as a $300 guitar with $600 worth of electronics on it. The previous ones were a little dodgy as guitars, but then Yamaha bought them, and put that $600 of electronics on a Yamaha electric guitar platform. This is not the world's best electric guitar; however, I already own a Yamaha so cheap they don't even sell it separately–you buy it combined with an amplifier, for like $150-200–and I quite like it.

You could accomplish something similar by using MIDI, which sends note data to a computer, which then plays those notes according to some synth it has handy, however:

• It ties you to a computer, where the Variax is all on-board the guitar.
• MIDI is a right royal pain in the ass, inviting an endless rabbit hole of buying packs of synthesized sounds.

MIDI is where I'll turn if I want to be able to play a guitar and have it sound like a piano. Not out of the question, but not yet.

The Variax should completely replace my current electric guitar, which I pulled down from the attic because it's a lot easier to record than my steel-string, as I'm trying to figure out how to make music by looping parts (more on that later, especially how many software UIs are replicating the controls of the aforementioned Echoplex™).

And some kid at a local school will get a pretty decent electric guitar for free.

ow.

Monday's nose surgery went fine. Not that it would have changed anything, but I may not have done all the reading, so I was a little surprised to find the pain to basically be every time I've been hit in the nose (mostly thanks to aikido), but worse. Also, since I'm pretty sure the surgery involved breaking my nose, I now know that every time in the past I may have wondered if I broke my nose...I didn't.

There is a very large and sensitive bundle of nerves just below and behind the septum, which I learned about from a book I have: easily accessible nerves are useful for self-defense, especially for people who don't have physical advantages like size or strength. This is why getting hit in the nose makes you at least tear up a lot, if not actually cry. One day in aikido my partner accidentally clocked me right on that nerve cluster while trying to do something else. Really a very solid strike with the blade of the hand. It hurt, but more striking was that my upper teeth and gums went numb. Painful, but even better from a self-defense perspective, highly distracting!

I went in to get the stitches and splints removed, and everything is fine. Never having broken my nose (clearly), I knew "splints" were involved, but I had no idea what they looked like: only that people talk about using popsicle sticks as some kind of field expedient. In yet another case of "I had no idea human sinuses were that big," these were about 1 inch by 3 inches. The first one may have been glued down by blood clots, very much being a Total Recall moment (don't click if you're squeamish).

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The unflappable surgeon was unfazed by my shouted profanity, and also unconcerned that the exam room door was open; I suppose you do want your surgeons to have focus. And he's a curious man.

Anna says even last night (with my nose mostly clogged) my breathing was markedly different; we'll see how it goes in the coming weeks and months. I guess this is how the rest of you have felt breathing through your nose, all this time? Show-offs.

the hits keep coming.

If you had asked me a month ago, I would not have guessed that an area as big as California could be entirely on fire, but here we are.

I'm from New England, where the states are mostly a manageable size, if you leave out the northern half of Maine (which is the largest county east of the Mississippi, and has a whopping population density of 11 people per square mile). California, by contrast, is just shy of 800 miles long, and unless you leave at 8pm, you won't make the drive in less than 12 hours. Here's the Bay Area, with the blue arrow pointing at my house. We're in the middle of civilization, so the fires don't threaten us directly, but the air is awful. Last night the usual pollution metric wasn't bad, but when I ventured to put the trash bins out, the air was full of eye-irritating ash, floating in the beam of my flashlight.

Really, my surprise just betrays my ignorance, or maybe just the tunnel vision of the endless global trauma that is 2020. Prior to the pandemic, Australia was on fire.

All these simultaneous fires come from an anomalous thunderstorm that moved slowly through the area. We don't get thunderstorms here to speak of, since they require heat and moisture, and normally it only rains in the chilly pseudo-winter. This was a legit thunderstorm, though, with louder thunder and very, very bright lightning, for about 4 hours. It did rain a little, but nowhere enough to stop the wildlands from igniting. They would be tinder-dry at this time of year anyway, but we had a stretch of 100º days that ensured everything was extra-scorched.

There is something worse than not being able to go out to coffee shops and dinner with friends and concerts, and that is not being able to leave your house at all because every place you'd go is closed, and the outside air hurts.