Stuff and things
Found on Lobste.rs, here’s a student developer who asked the question “What if I stored data in my mouse.”
The answer is “really not much” since it holds literally 2 bytes of data, but the process is fascinating and it’s just delightfully old school. This is hacking at its most pointless, because the discovery is the point.
Buying synthesizers is exciting. Buying guitar pedals and amps is fun. Buying new software plugins can be a delight too. But buying a mixer? Generally, this is a utilitarian piece of gear that doesn't get a lot of notice until it's not doing something you want it to. Late last year, though, my bandmate and I sprung for a used (but very nice) Behringer XR18 and it has changed everything for the better.
Behringer is not a name that commands a lot of respect through the music industry, but when it comes to digital mixers, they do have a reputation as a practical, durable, and feature rich. A lot of venues use them. The cousin of these big honking venue boards is the X-Air series, which comes as just a little box that's optionally rackmountable.
As an electronic duo, we mix most or all of the sound ourselves, and use in-ear monitoring (another world-changing thing, btw). Sound engineers at a club don't have any idea what you're supposed to sound like. And when they don't have the familiar bass/drums/guitar setup to deal with, they can only guess at levels and will almost definitely get it wrong. So bringing your own mixer is a great idea. But why a digital mixer? Take a look at the picture of this thing. It sits in a rack on stage and has no knobs, faders, or switches. All the settings are saved internally, and if anything needs to be tweaked you use an iPad, computer, or even your phone to adjust. The notion of "set it and forget it" is actually feasible, rather than taking a photo of an analog mixer before the show and trying to ensure you're at the same levels.
There are 4, count 'em, 4 aux outputs. While on some mixers you might normally use those as effects sends, there are enough built-in effects that are really decent (as well as compressor, EQ, and gate on every channel) that it's not necessary. So we can run two out to our in-ears, give each of us a separate monitor mix, and still have two available for emergency mix situations (say the sound person really wants vocals separate). All outputs are XLR, so no DI boxes on stage anymore. Bonus? It's a USB audio interface so you can get a multi-track recording of anything it's mixing as long as you have a computer or maybe an iPad running Logic.
Every year, I run sound as a volunteer for a multicultural festival and every year it gets to be more of a pain as the acts grow and their complexity increases. For the past decade or so, we've had a traditional setup:
What can I do next time? While the XR18 is rackmountable, its default setup is actually rubber feet that turn it into a stage box. All the mics on stage go into it, and then... that's it. No snake because the stage box is also a mixer. No board because you use an iPad. No outboard compressors because it's all in there. No outboard reverb or delay either. Just this little box... and four different monitor mixes too. Not that we'll tell the performers that. It's a volunteer gig after all.
More than 3 years ago now, Neurosis went out — not with a bang or even a fizzle, but with a really depressing deflation. The story is a real bummer, and so one of the most important bands in the universe to me seemed to retire more or less in shame, realizing that their entire legacy was tainted by a guy they didn't know as well as they thought they did. It's amazing yet true how well sociopaths can hide in plain sight from their closest friends for decades.
But they never actually said they were breaking up. And now, in a feat that seems nigh-impossible for a band of their stature in the year 2026, they have dropped an album completely by surprise. And what have they done to fill the void? They enlisted Aaron Turner of the bands ISIS, Old Man Gloom, and SUMAC. He's approaching legendary in his own right, and ISIS was severely indebted to Neurosis in the first place. There's nobody on the planet who makes more sense.
The album, though? Man, it's good. It's really good. If you are a fan, listen immediately. And while you're at it, go around the internet and look at comment threads about this. Not something I'd normally advocate, but there is a borderline-universal joy over this.
See, Neurosis isn't just a band, even a highly influential one, to the people who love them. They're an example of how to be a band with integrity and authenticity, which is why it was so painful to see them laid low by Scott Kelly, and why it's so incredible for them to return in such a triumphant way. It's also not lost on me that it's the spring equinox today, which seems very intentional for them.
So... the world has some problems right now, to be idiotically understated about it. But you can't ruin my day because Neurosis is back.
Fugazi, anyone?
I was talking to a friend and remembered a particularly impactful show from years ago. I believe the band that initiated the conversation was Lightning Bolt, but the show was called the Oops! Tour and featured them along with Erase Errata, The Locust, the Flying Luttenbachers, and Arab on Radar. It was the last one that left probably the most indelible stain on my psyche and my idea of what I wanted a live show to be (as an audience member and a performer).
They wore matching button-up black outfits, similar to Crass's, but that's kind of where any similarities end in terms of stage presence (though the noise guitar is not far off). As a YouTube commenter puts it, the guitarists seemed like they hated playing guitar — in fact the whole band seems to hate music — and they seemed on the verge of a terrible breakup-inducing fight at all times. The lights at the front of the stage cast giant shadows of the members behind them. It was goofy, ridiculous, and terrifying all at once. I've seen a lot of shows but there aren't that many I want to relive. Off the top of my head I can think of the Cramps, the first time I saw Neurosis, Butthole Surfers, Bauhaus's reunion... and this.
Here's a video from a similar time that gets the experience pretty close.
While I’m all-in on re-decentralizing the web, there are certain places where putting a lot of the same kind of content together does make sense. For instance, a music store. But that doesn’t mean a profit-driven version of the music industry that’s even worse than the old profit-driven music industry. Yes, I’m talking about Daniel Ek but I’m also talking about Bandcamp, which is somehow doing worse than it was under the Fortnite people.
So what would an alternative look like? According to Subvert, it would be a collective. It would build slowly, it wouldn’t require endless growth, and it would have a straight-up manifesto in the form of a zine. They have a pretty solid vision for a musician-owned world of digital presence. This checks way too many of my boxes to just ignore, so I signed up as a founding musician. It's got an interesting old-school aesthetic too.
We now have our music up on the alpha site, and if you're interested in supporting me and our tunes, I'd dig it if you gave that a shot. It's hard to break through the monopolies and duopolies of the current tech world, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
Back on Ghost. I've been experimenting with using an iPad as my primary non-musical daily driver and blogging on Eleventy just isn't that practical. I need a web-based CMS. So... I guess here I am? Old URLs might not work, I'm working on a redirect thingy. How many times have I done this now?
Also, I'm on a base theme until I learn how to make themes. Ghost has changed a lot since the last time I used it.
We just returned from 10 days in Japan, and though I've been a horrible weeb for many years it was my first time. This was a family trip, so balancing some cultural stuff and "endless shopping for the pop culture items the kids really love" was a tough act, but we managed.
It's long and expensive to get there, but cheap and easy to be there. If you could get a massive culture shock of a very different place but with all the conveniences and fried pork of a first-world country, why wouldn't you? I wish I'd done it sooner.
I sit here in my temporary housing, embracing the coziness of fall weather and its attendant sweaters and cocoas and whatnot, and face the prospect of being in a house without a dog to snuggle for the first time in around 20 years. Today we euthanized Cyrus, our absolute doof of a Boxer/Shepherd mix after a pretty darn long life and a much longer run with cancer than anyone expected.
He was certainly not always a good dog (friends who know about it... know about it), which only makes the feelings more complicated. And of course, when someone's life is in your hands, even a four-legged life, it's always complicated.
But we'll miss him a lot. Here's some pictures, mostly of him doing his one job: looking very sad with his Gregory Peck eyebrow.
I think if you'd asked me even a year and a half ago what I thought of soulslikes, I probably would've cursed Blighttown, felt bad about myself for my inadequacies, and sent you on your way. But after a full round of Miyazaki's Cruelest Trials and some other genre highlights such as Lies of P, Jedi Survivor, and Another Crab's Treasure, I think I'm too far gone.
It's not that I crave Fromsoft's punishing difficulty or even that it's my favorite genre of game, though I'd say Bloodborne is now among my all-time favorites of any genre. But something keeps me coming back to the satisfying combat and magical feeling of a hard-won victory. Beating a boss like the Dancer of the Boreal Valley or Marge, the Fell Homer (a dastardly guy made worse by how early you have to fight him) after way too many tries is simply one of the best rushes that a video game can give you.
When you fully "get" a boss, dodging and blocking at the right moment, attacking effectively — you might not even take damage at all, and you start to understand the old saw of "Dark Souls is a rhythm game."
On an intellectual level, thinking about these games, they're admirable for not being anything else. Maybe Naughty Dog would rather their games be movies (Uncharted was a passable movie despite Marky Mark, and HBO's The Last of Us is excellent). Maybe Suda51 loves meta-commentary about games more than actually making games. Hidetaka Miyazaki and co., on the other hand, have created a kind of game that can only be a game. The story is emergent based on the items and characters you find. The paths you take determine the world's progression. But what I think about most of all is that the mechanics are simple. Not "easy," mind you. Simple.
Skill trees, character classes, multiple kinds of currencies, minigames, superfluous collectibles, overblown cosmetics, quest markers, databases of enemy info, in-app purchases — get 'em outta here! Even your currency and XP are the same thing.
Obviously you put your scores where you want them, which influences your weapon choices and ways of fighting. And there are quests, as inscrutable as they might sometimes be. But at the end of the day, you hit things, you get stronger, you die, and you repeat. That's refreshing!
Some contrast. Hideo Kojima, wannabe Hollywood auteur and inventor of the stealth mechanic, has made a very successful pair of games where the open-world task of "getting from one place to another" is the entire game, with a side of inventory management. It's like the yin to Suda's "completely empty town" yang in No More Heroes. Just when I think I get the hang of Death Stranding's numerous controls, mechanics, and things to remember, another three or fourteen get put on the pile. I struggled for a while, then Lies of P was a PS Online game of the month and it was all over. Before that I tried Star Wars Outlaws, where the futility of fetch quests and the abundance of markers (insert Ubisoft joke here) made me feel aimless and listless... and suddenly Bloodborne was on sale.
Maybe these are dumb games. Maybe you're not moved by un-cancelable attacks, mumbly British-accented NPCs, or endlessly bleak environments with clever shortcuts. But soulslikes are an elegant kind of dumb, a precise and carefully-honed brick in a world of games that want to be complicated and thingamabobs — and I will continue to come back to them.
I love those kinds of blog posts where people talk about how it’s been a long time since they blogged. These are truly the great cultural moments we miss out on with a boring, centralized internet. I mean, how many people in music have died without me talking about how bummed out I am about it? Ozzy died, for heck’s sake. There hasn’t been one that bad since Prince, and I didn’t make a peep.
Some days you just don’t feel it. There’s no excuse, not even a particularly bad depressive episode or anything like that. Sometimes the lack of a CMS on this static site generator makes the barrier just a tiny bit too high.
And sometimes, you burn your house down.
That’s an exaggeration, of course. I didn’t burn my house down. In fact, looking at it from the front, you might not even notice that it burned at all. But it doesn’t take a very close inspection to notice that it’s in pretty bad shape. We lost the living room and the bulk of the kitchen, while the rest of the place is pretty well wrecked by smoke damage.
It’s not particularly fun thinking back on the morning of. It was a rude awakening if there ever was one. The kids didn’t sleep well for quite a well, and frankly neither did I. But we’re snug in a furnished rental and trying to manage the cleanup and rebuild, which is going to be the number one factor in our lives for the next… almost a year. It definitely could’ve been worse — every couple days we experience the disappointment and low-level grief of some “thing” we’ve had for decades that is now lost, but the truth is most of the important stuff like family photos, valuable hard drives, etc. is safe.
And so, as we settle in to a temporary life I hope to be ready to get goth about the next synth god’s death. Please, let’s protect Roger Linn.
