TubularCorporation

I used to have a Nanoverb an ex-Akai friend had acquired from somwhere or other, but for some reason it had a Nanobass front panel. Sounded great, and if I was still playing out regularly I'd miss having it.

That's a shame. Mine has a dim spot on the right side of the screen that's no problem now but is ominous, and it will randomly lose clock and spew out harsh digital noise from time to time when I use the digital i/o, but it sounds really nice even now. I did manage to get all the hot glue out and swap all the electrolytics in the power supply for better quality, slightly higher rated caps so it'll probably manage to survive for at least a few more years. Wish I'd known back when they were being blwn out for $80 or something new in box (but not as much as I wish I'd known abotu it when the Akai MFC42s were being blown out new in box for about the same!)

Juggalos are anti-racist.

The Moderna vaccine went into trials before the first wave and was pretty well confirmed safe and effective by last summer, it's just been completing the rest of the phases since then. The vast, vast majority of negative side effects with vaccines occur right away or in the first two weeks, so it's possible to actually go through the trials pretty fast without cutting many corners at all if the resources are there.

Yeah I have about 1.8tb of that stuff now, although probably 300gb is video. A big part of the problem is I'll come up with a general theme for an album, spend a month or two recording and rough mixing stuff, and then when I'm around 3/4 done I'll realize that it has drifted off course and the dark, atonal drone album I was working on is full of mutated afropop and lounge jazz sounding tracks.

Apparently a LOT of healthcare workers are reluctant/refusing vaccination. I guess there's a lot of misinformation about it spreading in healthcare Facebook communities. So between that and the existing US supply starting to be at risk of expiring because we're not deploying it fast enough between means testing, lack of organization and responsibility for rolling out immunization being diverted from existing government vaccination programs to private companies, we're pretty fucked. I'm in one of the smallest states in the country and at the rate we've been vaccinating so far it will take about 18 more months just to get our state done.

Yeah, I've got them all installed although there are so many I rarely use most of them. It seems like a really subtle thing that any EQ plugin would be just as good for, but I've been REALLY liking the Ultrasonic plugin he released a few weeks ago. I've been working at 48kHz instead of 96 for a couple years (to save space and let me use an ADAT expander for extra inputs) and slapping it on individual tracks that have a lot of highs has been really good for keeping things from getting edgy and harsh but keeping them sounding bright. I've tried using other lowpass filters up around the Nyquist frequency for the same job in the past and for whatever reason, his plugin does the job better to my ear (for what that's worth), maybe it's lower phase distortion or maybe it's just that there are no controls so I don't spend time second guessing it or apply too much, but for whatever reason it really works for me. In general his plugins that you can barely hear but that add up over an entire mix are my favorites, I've also been using his weird dithers in front of hardware sends a lot although I don't use them on final mixes or masters since everything's' probably going to get compressed at some point before it's heard anyhow, so I just use TPDF for my final files. I never messed much with IRon Oxide but I like ToTape 5 a lot, I've actually got an old Otari 1/4" and I still use ToTape regularly on individual tracks, only tape emulation I still use since I fixed the Otari up and got it running a few years back. Save the head wear on the Otari for final mixes and tape echo. But to stay on topic, as far as reverbs it's pretty much down to VVV, the OTO Bam and a Behringer V-Verb for me (not counting built in effects in gear, probably my most used reverb is he Octatrack Dark Reverb but that's more because I've been doing live to stereo recordings through the Octatrack a lot recently). BAM for big, lush, artificial sounding reverb, V-Verb for low-in-the-mix ambiences to make individual tracks sit in their own space without sounding like they have reverb, and VVV for when I want to use one reverb across a unch of tracks without committing to printing from hardware. Sometimes I'll go back when the mix is pretty much done and try swapping the BAM in for VVV to see if I like it better, and sometimes I do. I've still got an Alesis Wedge kicking around from when nobody wanted them. I like it a lot for a lot of things but I don't have the desk space to keep it permanently hooked up right now so it gets underused. EDIT: I almost forgot I've got an old Pioneer home stereo spring reverb that I use for special occasions when I can be bothered to hook it up. It doesn't sound right for everything but when it's right it's perfect, another great thrift shop find.

Soon

Believe it or not that's actually a pretty decent price, it took me forever to find one that I could afford and that's only because a bookshop put it up (comparatively) cheap on eBay because the cover is this faded:

Yeah, it's kind of amazing, especially since it was written and published in the early 70s while a lot of the groups it was talking about hand run their whole course yet, so it has a different perspective. I don't even remember how I first learned about it, I think it was cited in something else. This one's seems like a more sort of academic, comprehensive take on a lot of the same stuff, but I have to admit I haven't read much of it yet (and my old copy doesn't have the sort of self-helpy vibe that the Amazon description gives off): https://www.amazon.com/Guru-Papers-Masks-Authoritarian-Power/dp/1883319005

Oh definitely. Thanks for the articles! A lot of countercultural figures had gone into some pretty dark places that way by the 80s even if they didn't start there, Abbie Hoffman and Robert Anton Wilson come to mind. I finally found a copy of Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism that I could actually afford a couple years ago, maybe the time is right to finally make an audiobook of it. I'd scan it but the binding is too sketchy for that, and even a cheap copy was still close to $80, which is probably more than I've spent on half of the books I own combined but I'd been after it for over a decade.

Also the president is the one with the power to deploy the National Guard, so that wasn't likely.

There's a pretty direct continuity from 60s hippies through Right Libertarianism to the Tea Party and Qanon. Not all of them of course, but it's there, I've met more than one 70-something hippie who is now deep into Alex Jones.

Not as rare as you might think.

Implying that isn't literally what happened.

Police

Trumpism is the natural progression of the American conservative project since Nixon, it's only an abberation insofar as Trump was a loose cannon enabled by social media and existing conditions. But the Republican establishment went right along with it up until the last possible moment when it was obvious that the harm he was doing to their interests outweighed the good, which was way too late to do much. I'm double checking, what I was hearing last night was that they were especially severe but there was so little reporting it's starting to look like it might have been more routine, not that that makes much difference.

Anyway, the actual big news of yesterday might be the Israeli air strikes on Syria that happened while everyone was distracted by DC.

Also really kicked off the deregulation of the marketing industry and the erosion of the public educational system, which is a big part of how you end up with the situation we're in now.

Don't encourage them.

I live in one of the bluest states in the country and we have a pretty active white supremacist militia. On election day 2016 a caravan of about 20 SUVs drove around town for an hour or two blowing air horns at dark skinned people and waving flags.

I also didn't expect them to make it nearly as far as they did.

I expected it on inauguration day not today, but I also didn't expect Georgia's runoff elections to go the way they did.

I still blame Reagan.