I’m close to a month into the new job and I still like it a lot. Things are going well. Also having no regrets about the move. Last time we moved, we had major remorse about where we ended up. Yet we still stayed there for like 5 years? Honestly this times things seems like an all-around improvement.

Also enjoying city life quite a bit. I wasn’t sure I would actually like living in LA, but it’s pretty cool so far. My drive home takes me past Griffith park, so I can stop and job to Griffith Observatory on my way home when I feel like it. Pretty neat.

Are people still doing Hubski music stuff? I have a track I’ve been thinking about getting people to add to.

I am detecting a theme of moving house/moving work in this Hubski. I also am at week 2 of my new job/week 4 of the new apartment. So far things are so much better than before, but it’s still a new place and the wife and I need to make some local connections.

Awww yesss. I'm ready for you this time, craftski.

Finally got around to finishing that Metal Earth bass model. It's super nifty. I would totally do another.

I've been doing lots of music stuff too.

A couple friends and I started recording things in the garage when the band isn't practicing in it. We came up with one track which I think is actually kinda cool. We have a couple of branches going on for the arrangement of parts, but this is the one I've been working on, which adds in sound clips from The Brain That Wouldn't Die and other stuff:

I dusted off an old scratchy 4-track tape loop I had recorded years ago and did something with it. There's not much going on, just layers coming and going, but I kinda like it:

I also started playing a lot of guitar and throwing down ideas with them. My playing style non-deliberately tends to be kinda southern metal, so I really leaned into it this time. I came up with 4 or 5 demo songs, the best of which is this:

Then there's a #breadwatch I need to post too.

It's nice and rainy here. At least it was yesterday.

I've been browsing potential obnoxious mods for my GTI. Headlights? Spoiler extender? Not sure what I'll do. All that stuff is pretty ridiculously expensive.

Edit: oh yeah, almost forgot there's a video for an old song up on the ol' youtube:

It's been kinda crazy here. Work has been a bit frustrating and I've been in a bit of a rut, so I've been just spent for a while now. It will definitely help to have a break for the holidays.

I'm staying put for the first time (ever?) for christmas. Just me and the fiancee this year, and I'm looking forward to it. We have a tiny tree, and I'm thinking about making something nice for a holiday dinner. Duck maybe? We roasted ducks at my aunt's place and they came out pretty great. I may try that.

Morning coffee

I got to play with Hemlock in my metal band this weekend. It was a very cool show. Next month we go to the studio. We're gonna replace a guitarist (again) in the coming weeks too though, so we'll see how that goes.

Work is truckin' along. It's going to necessarily take me months to get settled in because of the various bureaucratic processes, but stuff is slowly getting there. I finally did charge my first $32 yesterday, so that's cool.

So my dilemma from last week continues. I was ready to tell the academic job no, but they weren’t having it. They’re dead set on getting me there, and they might just do it. They updated the salary band for the job, so now the academic position is distinctly more salary and better benefits.

To be clear, this isn’t some professorial position, it’s more of an academic support position. It should have a more conventional work-life balance than a job like that yet there’s always bound to be some bleed-in from working smack dab in the middle of it all. I’m certain it’ll be more work overall and more responsibilities, but not by an avalanche. It looks to be commensurate with the pay increase.

Im still comfortable where I’m at now, but it’s a bit harder to rationalize that it’s best to stay put when there’s a better paying option. So many of the other would-be deciding factors depend on my ability to predict the future, so I’m not too keen on those. At this point I’m pretty inclined to take it.

I made a neat animated pixel Tascam Portastudio. I've been re-recording a song I wrote with it, sans mistakes, to post later on.

My gf got a SNES classic. I never had Super Nintendo growing up, but I had an N64. I spent all weekend on that thing. Particularly Zelda and Starfox. I had the games for those franchises that were on the N64, and it's like reliving the childhood wonderment I found in those games. I had no idea A Link to the Past was so baller and inspires so much of Ocarina of Time.

My German coworker has absolutely no chill about football right now.

I’m here at the airport at 4:45 am. I’m earlier than expected; I’ve got almost 3 hours before my flight. I’ll be flying all day to catch a funeral tomorrow. Coffee or liquor?

The other night the house was flooded with acetone fumes from the neighbors downstairs. They're doing something to the floors and filled the whole place with a coat of acetone, leaving the windows open to let the fumes waft into the condos upstairs. I had to take the cat and hole-up in the car for a few hours while I figured out how to air-out our place. That was fun.

Other than that I've been working on some unfinished art to pair with my music project. I have:

A phony subway map of all the tracks

A monolith on a martinscape

and some hokey elk bird tiles

What I'd like to do with some (all?) of these is print them onto paper then scan them back at high-res to get some texture to it to curb the digital-ness.

The Album is done! But I'm not going to show you... yet. I'll upload something for the NaSoAlMo group later today or tomorrow, but I'm going to break a few rules for the challenge and release an extended/more polished version in about a week. That one I'll promote.

Of course, this means it's the perfect time for the RAM on my desktop to start crapping out. I'm pretty sure it's warrantied and I can do an RMA, but that means I'd be out a usable computer for X amount of time while I await the replacement RAM. I may have to either scavenge RAM from another computer if it's compatible, or relent to an upgrade to 16GB and drop a chunk of change I wasn't planning for before the holidays.

So I've decided to participate in National Solo Album Month, (or NaSoAlMo, one of the worst acronyms ever). For real this time. Whatever I get I'm gonna publish on youtube at the least.

I grabbed a solo moniker for this specifically (so I don't have to be stuck with it if the end product sucks). So all progress and bits go up on the Elk Bird Stone soundcloud page. I actually started working on bits last night (totally cheating) and there's some stuff up there now.

Also went camping with the lady.

Along the way there was a pit stop where all the fancy cars and motorcycles going up the 2 take a rest. There were Porsches, Skylines, Ducatis and all sorts of cool stuff. I was most intrigued by the mint Saab Sonett III though:

Here's the desk. I just got a new keyboard since I spilled wine all in the last one. I am still fumbling like mad when I type on it.

Behind my chair there's more music stuff. There's also a nice little patio area.

Turning left from the last picture is the little makerspace. I've been dabbling with electronics for a bit and mean to do more. I'm very much considering using some of my tax return for a tube amp kit.

I love that this lists all the reasons I hate those things. It's one of those devices that annoys you by the virtue of it being clearly poorly designed, rather than by the actual inconvenience of it. Why does the screen change so many times when nothing changes? Why is the error sound the same as the success sound? I mean, holy crap.

I didn't see a price and I didn't ask. I imagine it's sitting in the same spot still. I may go back and look.

I've been homebrewing for a few years now. I've been doing meads for a bit longer, and have one approaching bottling time in the next week.

I just got the parts for a cooler mashing tun conversion which I need to assemble, but I need a slightly longer version of one of the stainless threaded pipes. Once I have that I'm gonna do a brew. A tripple maybe? It's been waaaay too long since I've started a new beer.

I think I did, since I promised I would post something but never did. It's really a testament to my groundbreaking anti-establishment cooking style. I did make a one-pot dirty martini for myself though.

I would agree that there are some unanswered questions regarding the building collapse, and that it deserves much more scrutiny than it has been given. I don't think I buy the idea that it was controlled demolition though, or that there was a deliberate conspiracy outside of Al Qaeda to destroy the towers.

There's issues with the controlled demolition hypothesis itself, but then there's also the larger, much more insane question of "why?" Gage gives a nice slippery non-answer to the question fairly early in the video, but there's too many obvious questions about why would you want to organize a controlled demolition. You already have planes hitting the towers, why do you need to demolish them too? To maximize destruction? If you're trying to maximize destruction, why make it a controlled demolition rather than uncontrolled? If it was part of a conspiracy, why involve the large number of people needed to orchestrate a demolition rather than just skip it? Why WTC7? Etc.. In a practical world it seems like the least likely possibility.

I might instead buy the idea that, rather than a conspiracy, the was gross incompetence and a series of massive fuckups that made it worse than it had to be. From intelligence, politics, and communication to engineering and code violations that point the blame at some top brass and powerful individuals. I could see the government not wanting to scrutinize it too hard and shine the light on those problems.

I make mead! Does it count if you drink your own?

Looking at this guy you can feel a bit of both sides at work here. On one hand, there's no question our generation has been dealt a worse hand than the one before it. He lists a lot of the stats, but apparently practically any meaningful lifestyle/career statistic you can compare between Gen Y and the Baby Boomers has Gen Y coming up short.

On the other hand this guy went through a whole lot of expensive education racking up debt to enter a career where he won't be able to pay it off. I don't blame him though; I know the atmosphere and attitude that lead Gen Y to follow their passions in college and careers when the reality seems like a predatory trap for moneylenders. Yet you see why people would call that entitled.

If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.

I have no words....

Feminism in modern society is a strange thing. Feminism has a long history with discrete waves and motivations, and there's a modern population that largely doesn't understand them.

One of the more progressive ideas to be embraced by (some in) the current wave of feminism is total gender neutrality in society. Things like chivalry couldn't be compatible with this wave, because something like chivalry reinforces notions that femininity comes with certain conditions and expectations. It will be "ladies first" but that is because ladies are weak, helpless, "pure", etc., and will be expected to behave like such in society. It strives to redefine the concept of "feminine" to strip it of it's insidious restraints of women. So the current state of feminism is pretty nuanced and evolved, but a lot of people are clueless to that.

Rather, you have a lot of people who think of feminism in terms of the attitudes of the first wave: marked by anger and rather reactionary. You have people rallying for and against feminism on these terms such that it has become the commonly perceived face of feminism.

IMO it should be banned, and I've never said that about any book, ever. Ok, maybe not banned, but good god, it sounds like an assault on the English language.

I can't help but think of how much flak Mark Twain got over writing Huckleberry Finn in the dialect that people spoke instead of "proper English". It's one thing to put this kind of writing in a formal work, but using this in a creative work isn't anti-language, it's a recognition of reality. Mistaking this as acceptable for an essay on Shakespeare isn't a gaffe from ttyl's author, it's an issue of someone else's stupidity.