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It's nearly October. How did that happen? I said at the beginning of September that I was dealing okay with the discovery that I'm autistic and that I very likely have ADHD and that has continued to be the case. For most of the time, at least. So how have I been doing?
Much to my surprise, I received a clean bill of health from the blood tests I had a couple of weeks ago. They were part of a medical review which was one of the things that have been stressing me out recently. Apart from my cholesterol levels being a bit high (sadly, I guess that means I need to cut down on almond croissants for breakfast and ease off on my consumption of dairy products and pizza), my blood sugar levels are fine and I am showing no signs of becoming pre-diabetic at all. I was surprised to be told that my kidneys are functioning properly. That was delightfully unexpected but very welcome news.
But while my physical health is fine, I'm still wary of examining my emotional well-being too closely. For the time being, I'm trying to avoid thinking about how I feel, because things get very intense very quickly. It's exhausting. One classic trait of ADHD is that when you're lying in bed trying to get to sleep, your brain will be absolutely determined not to let you switch off and that's a particularly taxing problem for me at the moment. It has been for most of my adult life, if I'm honest about it—but it seems to have become much worse over the past year. I keep telling myself to keep calm and trust that things will eventually sort themselves out; the fact that my life has already changed so significantly this year gives me hope that this will happen.
For the moment I'm just gritting my teeth and dealing with it, but I had another rough night last night. I wish that the Universe would cut me a bit more slack, I really do; it's been a mad few years and I could do with a nice break.
I spent yesterday afternoon doing more work on the new ICH album. After I'd rendered out both tracks again (and that took so long that I was able to go downstairs, cook and eat my tea and do the washing up before my PC had finished the first track) I put them on a memory stick and gave them another listen on the audio system in my living room.
It all sounded much better. I still heard one or two little niggles that I need to sort out with equalization, but the compositions flow nice and smoothly from start to finish and the builds are now suitably dramatic (Waves's old S1 Stereo Imager turned out to be the secret sauce, there).
At the moment I'm reading Greg Milner's excellent book on the history of recorded music, Perfecting Sound Forever and as I listened to my own music surrounding and enveloping me last night, I found myself wondering what Thomas Edison would have made of it all. His pursuit of "high fidelity" sound seems rather quixotic today, although according to Milner several of the technologies which he invented were demonstrably better than the ones developed by his competitors which eventually supplanted them.
I've always been fascinated by audio technology but up until now I had very little idea of how it was developed beyond knowing that Edison was "the wax cylinder guy". Until I read Milner's chapter about him, I had no idea that the British conductor Leopold Stokowski was so influential; if you're my sort of age, if you ever encountered him at all it was most likely on the silver screen because he's the long-haired conductor in Disney's classic animated film Fantasia (1940) or perhaps you saw Bugs Bunny's merciless impersonation of him in the Warner Brothers cartoon Long-Haired Hare (1949) but a lot of modern studio techniques owe their existence to his work with microphone placement and stereo recording. Stokowski and Edison had very different views on whether the sound of the room in which an orchestra performs should be part of a recording or not. Even so, the fact that my system's amplifier can modify any recording in my collection so that I can listen to it as if I was sitting in a number of different concert venues including the Golden Hall in the Musikverein in Vienna or New York's famous jazz club, The Bottom Line would probably have blown their minds. (Do I use this functionality much? No, not really. Quite aside from the mess it makes of recordings which already reflect the acoustic environment in which they were made, I find it gimmicky and a little bit tacky. But the DTS Neural:X processing which I mentioned yesterday is another matter entirely; I think even Edison would have liked that.)
And while we're talking about immersive audio, you'll be pleased to hear that the new Atmos release of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway is every bit as good as I'd hoped it would be.
The back garden robin has been singing its heart out outside the kitchen door this morning. I love hearing it. Now that the summer moult is over, the local birds have been a lot noisier and the corvids in particular are rather shouty at the moment; the crows and jackdaws continue their territorial squabbles over the chimneys of the flats at the back of the house, and a couple of magpies have taken to heckling them from the sidelines. I've spotted the neighbourhood's heron from my studio window once or twice this month, too.
Down at ground level, things aren't quite as bustling. It was just 2°C (35°F) in the back garden overnight, and I only had three video clips to download from the trail cam this morning. They were all of the same, solitary hedgehog munching its way through the peanuts and hedgehog biscuits (which seem to be repackaged dry cat food) I'd left out for it on the back lawn. Was it stocking up ready for hibernation? Possibly; since the nights have turned colder, the amount of activity I've recorded in the back garden has tailed off noticeably. The Virginia creeper on the side of the house is already turning red, so winter no longer feels very far away.
But the house didn't feel cold last night. The solar panels seem to do a good job acting as an extra layer of insulation and the temperature in my bedroom tends not to vary by more than half a degree Celsius in any twenty-four hour period.
A couple of my neighbours have told me they've already put their central heating systems on this month. I haven't needed to do that, but I ran the gas fire for a while on Saturday night. It was mainly to make sure that it still works, but it was also because I'd been doing nothing more taxing than sitting on my sofa, channel surfing and I needed to warm up a bit. Nevertheless, my energy bill this month was negative for the fifth time in a row—although I'm pretty sure it'll be the last one like that for this year. Looking at the ridiculous amount of credit I'm in with my energy supplier right now, I really ought to request another refund from them. All that money should be earning me interest, not them...
Last night I listened to the working mix of the third album that Ingrid, Henry and I are working on (which is tentatively just called ICH 3) by playing it through the big system in the living room, using the amp's DTS Neural:X processor to create an immersive audio experience through ALL TWELVE of the system's speakers.
The album is coming in at just over 75 minutes as it stands and it's already sounding pretty good, even though I haven't applied any mastering to it yet beyond dropping Sonnox's Oxford Inflator on the mix bus.
Even though I don't have the capability to create Atmos mixes in my home studio, listening to the album through something which effectively spreads my stereo mix out into a fully three-dimensional sound field gave me lots of ideas for tweaking the mix in order to make the builds hit home more dramatically, which I'll be doing later this afternoon. I want to make a few sounds gradually open out so that they start as point sources but end up sitting across the mix; I'm sure I have at least one plugin which lets me do that. After that, I'm still waiting for a few bars of jazz trumpet from Henry which will add a sonic cherry on the top of everything. I think you're going to like how it all sounds; I already do!
Despite working on ICH 3 and my own solo album, my musical output this summer is much less than normal because there's no Fifty/Ninety running this year. If you read any of my blogs from any summer from the last twelve years or so (which you can find in my blog archive) you'll soon see how unusual this is for me.
The Fifty/Ninety challenge involves writing fifty songs in the ninety days between July 4th and October 1st, and in past years I've usually managed to exceed that target (and on one memorable occasion, I went mad and somehow managed to write more than double the required number of songs). I've learned a fantastic amount about the craft of songwriting (and producing, and mixing, and mastering) as a result of participating. I've become a much better musician, too.
But I can't say I've missed the challenge this summer. Last year, the community experience just didn't feel the same, somehow; and from the comments people have made in Slack over the last month or so, it seems I'm not the only person feeling this way. By the end of last September I was blogging about just how unpleasant taking part had become, and even if this year's challenge had gone ahead, it would probably have done so without me. Back in June and July my mental health simply wasn't good enough that choosing to put myself through all that again would have seemed like even a remotely sensible idea. I'm feeling much better this month, and while I know that a lot of other factors are responsible for that, I'm sure that not having to deal with moderating the challenge has helped me to feel better.
October is going to be a busy month for me, but maybe I'll try to write a few songs in November. Just to keep my hand in.
I was delighted to see yesterday that John Oliver has discovered one of the legends of German television, Bernd das Brot, and was enthusiastically extolling his virtues on his late-night show this week. I have been a fan of Bernd's since the early oughts when I first stumbled on KiKa's post-shutdown programming while I was channel surfing the multitude of channels I can pick up on my satellite dish. I found myself wondering what the hell I was watching because Bernd is a loaf of bread with hands but no arms, and a face that tells you instantly that this is a character who has Seen Some Shit. His deep, plangent voice (that of his puppeteer, Jörg Teichgraeber) is an absolutely perfect match for the character.
Bernd appears on KiKa during the day as the star of a children's puppet show where his character is always depressed and gloomily nihilistic; his catchphrase is "My life is hell." (I know, right?) But at night we find him either floating in orbit above the Earth or trapped in a featureless white void where he is regularly mocked by one or more small white robots, or by a dinosaur in a spacesuit with a rocket pack (yes, really; I am not making this up). He is also frequently blown up by gadgets which the robots ask him to try or bumped into by occasional passing satellites. Oh, and he sighs heavily and says "Mist!" ("Crap!") a lot. Each segment lasts no more than a couple of minutes, but they all blend seamlessly into each other. They're all available online, so if you've been missing out on the fun and can speak a bit of German you can watch them right now.
You really should.
I adjusted my coffee grinder last week so that it grinds more finely, and I think I might have overdone things. The espressos which I've been making for my breakfast lattés over the past few days have been taking much longer to draw and the resulting mug of coffee is noticeably darker than I'm used to.
The buzz I've been getting from each cup has been markedly stronger too, even though I'm using the same beans that I always use. And even though its effect should have worn off by the time I go to bed twelve or thirteen hours later, for the last couple of nights I've struggled badly to get to sleep—even more so than I usually do. I was still wide awake at three am this morning.
Admittedly, I have a number of things on my mind at the moment, but I ought to be better at falling asleep than this. I might take the highly unusual step of taking a break from caffeinated drinks for a week or so to see if that makes any difference.
Shocking, isn't it? But I need my sleep!
Yesterday I managed to break the back of the main piece for the next album from ambient supergroup ICH (Ingrid N, me, and Henry Lowman) and get it into a shape I'm very happy with. I'll be doing some more work on that over the next few days but I already really like how it's sounding. And it felt good to spend a most productive day in the studio working on something new.
It's looking like the finished album will be nearly eighty minutes long, which I wasn't expecting at all. But I've been experimenting more this time with edits and leaving space, and the difference in the feel of the music when I did so convinced me very quickly that this was the way to go.
The courier just delivered my copy of the new super deluxe 50th anniversary edition of Genesis's album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway which includes a new Dolby Atmos mix by Bob Mackenzie, so I am going to fire up my immersive audio system and spend the next few hours sitting on the sofa being amazed by an album I've listened to dozens (if not hundreds) of times.
Can't wait!
The autumn equinox takes place this evening at 19:19, which marks the start of astronomical autumn (as I explained earlier, meteorological autumn began on the first of September). It really feels like autumn has properly arrived, too: the temperature dropped to just 4°C (39°F) in the back garden last night.
The Sun is considerably lower in the sky than it was back in June. It's sunny here today, but while the bird table is in direct sunlight (so the solar panel on the trail camera which is clamped to it is still able to charge its battery to 100% by lunchtime) most of the back garden is still in the house's shadow. The big panels on the roof of the house and garage are still putting out a healthy 4 kW, though.
The evenings are drawing in rapidly now. Sunrise today was at 06:56 and sunset will take place at 19:08, so we're nearly at the point where I'm only getting twelve hours of daylight each day. It's properly dark outside by 9 pm now (astronomical twilight ends at 21:01 tonight), and back in the day that would mean I'd start sitting in the back garden to do a bit of stargazing in the evenings. Sadly I don't really get to do that any more, because people around here just love having lights on the outside of their houses and leaving them on all the time.
I'm not missing out on seeing the interstellar comet Comet 3i/ATLAS at the moment though, as it's pretty much on the other side of the solar system from us and close to the Sun in the sky. Even at its closest approach, I won't be getting photos like I did with Comet F3/NeoWISE back in 2020:
I'm still rather proud of that one.
Google Street View has just been updated with the imagery from the car which I spotted back in July but they've not updated the very end of the cul-de-sac where I live. I guess it's because I was outside my house cutting back the Virginia creeper. The imagery there dates back to 2009, long before I had any of the work done on the exterior.
It's a pity; I was rather hoping to gain a fleeting few moments of blurred-out fame...
Yesterday I took advantage of the nice weather (it's likely to be the only decent day we get here all week) to get some gardening done. It was the first time I've done any work in the back garden in weeks and after I'd pruned the buddleia (which I forgot to do last year, so there was a lot of it to cut back) and mowed the lawn, my garden waste bin was full to the brim. It's just as well that today is green bin day because the sooner it's emptied the sooner I can get back out there and finish clearing things away before the winter. Last year, I rather let things slide, and I have yet to make up the ground I lost as a result. I need to prune the other buddleia, cut back the cherry tree, and do something about the dense jungle that the flower bed on the West side of the garden has become. I also have a bit of a brambles problem. But already, after yesterday's session I'm surprised by just how much more light there is here in the dining room. And I can see the bird feeders properly again, too—even if the local sparrows are clearly rather nervous about using them now that they are much more exposed. While they were surrounded by foliage, both feeders would be emptied in under a day but they're still almost full this morning.
A good two-and-a-half hours' gardening meant I was burning more calories than I normally do and by the time I'd finished tidying up the lawn I was a sweaty, wobbly wreck so I put everything back in the garage and headed back inside for a restorative mug of tea and a packet of crisps. I could definitely tell I'd done more physical work than usual so after taking a couple of painkillers I decided to risk running a bath for the first time since the end of June (the tub has been flexing and creaking rather alarmingly and I don't like the look of what appear to be cracks in the bottom of it, so back then I decided not to tempt fate unless it was absolutely necessary). I'm happy to report that nothing untoward happened, catastrophically or otherwise. Just being able to lie in the tub and soak for an hour or so was absolute bliss. Showers are okay for getting yourself clean, but you simply can't luxuriate in a shower like you can in a bath, no matter how good the water pressure is. Even so, I must admit I heaved a sigh of relief when the last of the water had drained down the plughole afterwards.
But it was nice to lose myself in a set of mundane tasks for a while and not think about anything beyond how I was going to fit as much foliage as I could in my green bin—although at one point I did catch myself thinking, "Look at me being all normal and stuff..."
I discovered when I weighed myself this morning that I'd lost a pound and a half (0.7 kg) since yesterday. I guess it was all that gardening. And I've just got the results back from last week's health check-up. Aside from my cholesterol levels being a bit high (I need to give up those packets of crisps and cheese continues to be my Achilles heel), everything else is okay. My blood pressure was a bit high when it was measured at the surgery, but this morning it was 126 / 74, which is absolutely fine.
Being told "Nothing to worry about" is always very welcome, particularly given my medical history. The check-up was the principal thing which has been putting me under more stress than I'm comfortable with recently. My imagination had been running away with me, of course; I'd been visualising all sorts of nasty scenarios which might have played out, just as I did when I ran the bath yesterday afternoon. This, folks, is how my mind works these days. I rather wish it preferred to think of nicer things instead.
If you've read more than a couple of entries in this blog over the years you'll be well aware of my fondness for the humble em-dash. And I use it as it was meant to be used—with no spaces to separate it from the words it follows and precedes. This practice, it turns out, has become the focus of a moral panic. Any text in which an em-dash is used correctly is seen as signifying that it was generated by a Large Language Model (LLM) such as ChatGPT. This is, presumably, because the sort of people who are responsible for spreading the moral panic aren't the sort of people who know how to use an em-dash properly and therefore don't expect others to know how to use one, either.
Let's get one thing sorted out before we go any further: LLMs are not AI, despite the media's continued, woefully misinformed insistence otherwise. LLMs are nothing more than statistical bullshit-generating machines. They work by trawling through an immense database of articles (often gathered without any attention to things that human writers benefit from, like copyright law or intellectual property rights) and building sentences by choosing the next word or punctuation mark which crops up most often in writing that looks similar. While this might give the impression that the LLM "understands" what it's been tasked to do, the reality is that the LLM doesn't. There's no cognition involved. An LLM has no concept of reality. An LLM doesn't—it simply cannot—know how the world works, or the meaning of the words it's throwing at you, and it is not aware of the things (physical or metaphysical) that those words are associated with. It isn't at all bothered about whether or not each sentence it constructs for you makes sense, let alone whether it's true, because an LLM has no thoughts, let alone feelings or motives. It's just running through a collection of existing sentences in exactly the same way that your phone's autocomplete function does, and picking the most likely next word. The only difference is that an LLM's collection of sentences is much, much bigger (that's why it's called a LARGE language model, folks).
So: if what an LLM generates contains a lot of em-dashes, that means that the articles (written by literate humans) which had been scraped for the LLM to plagiarise (because that's all that LLMs do) must therefore have contained a significant number of em-dashes which had been used in the correct fashion. By people who knew what they were doing, which (and I will repeat myself here, because it's an important point) LLMs most definitely do not. Erudite people use em-dashes (you aren't going to change my mind on this) so because it's cribbed their work, the LLM is going to do the same thing. It's a copycat, so that's all it can do. If LLM developers thought that trustworthy people always wore white hats, you can bet that LLMs would too; the reasoning is the same, as far as I can see.
Which is probably why the latest short imagined monologue over at McSweeney's had me roaring with laughter yesterday.
By the way: I can assure you that I would never use an LLM to create any of the material featured anywhere on this website because apart from the profligate waste of energy that's involved, I just don't see the point.
Last night brought with it some of the most violent weather that I've experienced here so far this year. At one o'clock in the morning I was lying in bed listening to the wind thrashing heavy rain against the bedroom window. Weirdly, this wasn't even a named storm system passing through, just an area of low pressure. The Met Office station at Filton recorded several wind gusts of 43 mph last night and it's still pretty wild out there this morning. Another torrential shower has just dumped even more rain on the village, which I suspect means that the culvert which takes the Little Avon River through Charfield Green will have filled up once again; it's been bone dry for most of August. But I don't really feel like going out and having a look. I'm staying indoors.
The house and garden seem to have weathered things all right. I can't see any bits of tile on the ground and my solar panels are still on the roof and right now, with the sun shining, they're generating 4.2 kW. That's not too shabby, given that we're slightly more than a week away from the autumn equinox. Checking my stats on the system's web page, I can see that it has now generated a total of 9,245.30 kWh of electricity since it was brought online. But I've exported a grand total of 10.38 MWh to the grid in that time because my energy provider pays me to let them store surplus electricity in my battery and then take it back when demand is at its peak. Even though the hours of daylight I get each day are shrinking as rapidly as they ever do, so far this month I've been paid £20 more for the electricity I've supplied back to the grid than I've paid for electricity I've taken from it. I might not get a negative energy bill again this month like I've done for the past four months, but even so, I won't be very far off breaking even.
The windy weather also means that my energy provider expects to generate enough electricity between 14:00 and 15:00 today to give the surplus away for free, so I'll probably run a load of washing though my machine later. With all of the madness going on at the moment, I think it's important to take note of the few ways in which things have changed for the better over the past 25 years and the accelerating uptake of solar and wind power is very definitely one of them. I actually dreamed about having a couple of wind turbines in the back garden last night. I must have been listening to the wind in my sleep.
As I spend most evenings these days sitting at the desk in my recording studio which has a nice view of the sky out of a North-facing window, I have been acutely aware of how quickly the nights have been drawing in this month. We're just over a week away from the autumn equinox, which takes place at 19:22 on September 22nd, so sunset is happening two or three minutes earlier every day. Sunrise this morning was at 06:45 here (tomorrow it'll happen at 06:46), and sunset tonight will be at 19:23 (tomorrow it's at 19:21). Last night I reset the timer on the lights in the living room so that they'll come on 45 minutes earlier this evening, and that's the second time I've had to do that this month.
I think I understand why I'm particularly fond of this time of year, now. It's because "not going out anywhere and just staying indoors on my own" becomes socially acceptable once again. I can just work on music and, when I've had enough of that, watch a few episodes of the many television series that I'm working through at the moment. And if I run out of things to watch on the streaming services I'm paying for, I have a large collection of box sets of older shows that I have yet to finish (or in some cases, even start...)
I've ordered the new bathroom. I'm excited. I can't wait!
An hour after I'd blogged about putting a hoodie on this week, I'd done just that. I think we've seen the last of the warm weather for the year; it was the coolest night of the autumn so far here last night. In the back garden the temperature dropped down to 6°C (43°F) so this morning I brought my umbrella plant, which has been on its summer holidays on the back patio, back inside. After the recent rainfall, its leaves are looking nicely washed and there's even been some new growth but I don't want it to catch a chill. I've had the thing since I lived in Milton Keynes.
I've still got the summer duvet on the bed and even though I'd added a blanket on top this week, it felt fairly chilly with the bedroom windows open on Friday night. So last night I resorted to taking a hot water bottle with me to bed.
Oh boy—I slept like a log. It was wonderful. My watch gave me a sleep score of 100 this morning, and it felt like it, too. This morning I was up and about before 10 am (which is unusual for me these days; I always used to hate getting up early in the mornings, so now I don't) and after a large mug of coffee, a pain au chocolat, and an almond croissant I feel pretty darn good today. I'm not expecting it to last because I'm getting old and that's not the way of things any more and I seem to struggle with getting a good night's sleep two nights in a row, but I think I'll break out the hot water bottle again tonight and see what happens...
These days I really appreciate the rare occasions when I can get myself comfortable enough to get a good night's sleep.
I'm working on three separate music projects at the moment. I have more than enough in my schedule to keep me occupied all day, every day for the next few months. But a part of the work I do is devoted to playing and experimenting and finding out what sort of weird noises I can get out of my collection of studio devices so that I can incorporate them into my music. And so yesterday afternoon I spent an enjoyable couple of hours just playing with the Red Panda Particle 2 to see what I could make it do to a few simple notes played on piano—and then feeding that into the Hologram Electronics Microcosm, Eventide H90, and the Mooer Ocean Machine (as well as feeding the piano separately into the Chase Bliss Mood Mk 2, and then feeding the Mood's output back into the other effects chain for good measure; the resulting sound very rapidly becomes entertainingly complicated).
I've downloaded quite a few patches for the Particle and the H90 from the Patchstorage website over the years, and I feel its only fair that I should make my own contribution to such a helpful resource so yesterday I uploaded another couple of my own creations to their Particle 2 page. You can download them (for free) and try them out on your own Particle 2, should you wish.
I've been pleasantly surprised to see how many times people have already checked them out.
With the wider state of the world being what it is at the moment, I'm finding my tendency to retreat into my back bedroom and just make music is even stronger than it usually is, and it was already at an obsessive level; you don't release forty-something albums on Bandcamp in the space of five years unless you've got a fairly neurodivergent approach to life in the first place. My studio is a place of escape, a safe haven, and a means of enabling creative fulfilment, all rolled into one.
Now that the evenings are getting shorter and the weather is getting colder, wetter, and windier (the Met Office have issued a yellow warning of wind in effect for Wales and the whole of southern England from 8 pm tonight until 6 pm tomorrow) I don't feel the slightest reluctance to retreat in there instead of going outside and doing something healthy.
After all, I've got a window in there; I can sit and watch the clouds hurtling past if I need to find out what's going on elsewhere.
My studio setup continues to evolve. No, I haven't bought any more gear; since I took the photograph of my desk that you can see below, I've moved stuff around and now the Ocean Machine is on the plinth next to my Big Knob (stop sniggering at the back, there) and the Microcosm is sitting in between the Particle 2 and the H90. Why? Because the results sound nicer, and this arrangement lets me tweak the settings on my Ocean Machine more easily (from experience, it's the effect that seems to need the most encouragement to play nicely with what's being fed in to it). I am delighted with the Microcosm; it's a splendid bit of kit.
I've been busy recording with it all, too; I've now got seven new tracks recorded for my next album of instrumental, prog/ambient crossover music (I've decided there won't be any drums on this one, for a change) which add up to more than half an hour of audio and I will be noodling around a bit more in the studio this afternoon. I listened to what I've done so far on headphones last night, and even though I picked out a few things that I need to change on one track, the rest of it sounded very nice.
This week I've also received some new files from my contributors in ICH to play with, and I hope to be working on a track with my buddy Alan at the weekend, too. I've never been so immersed in making music as I have since I rebuilt the back bedroom back in 2020. It's a very satisfying situation to be in.
Deciding to build the Perseverance Lego kit when I did turned out to be rather timely, because this week NASA announced that the rover has discovered the "strongest evidence yet" for there once being life on Mars.
This refers a rock discovered last year inside Jezero Crater which NASA named Cheyava Falls (after the highest waterfall in the Grand Canyon back on Earth). The rock attracted attention because of the markings visible on its surface, which were rapidly nicknamed "poppy seeds" and "leopard spots." When the discovery was first announced, the Perseverance team called these markings "intriguing," but things got even more interesting back in March this year when an analysis of the chemical signatures and fine structure of the markings was published, suggesting that they were caused by biological processes. This is because similar markings, which were caused by early microbial life, can be found on Earth.
Perseverance has collected samples which were originally intended to be returned to Earth for intensive analysis using instruments that the rover doesn't have on board. The trouble is, the current administration in the United States intends to cancel the sample return mission.
Because of course they do.
It's definitely turned cooler here. I'm still wandering around the house in jeans and a t-shirt, but I must admit today I found myself wondering whether it might be a good idea to put a hoodie on...
It's been a week of sunshine and showers here. There's even been the occasional rumble of thunder, although nothing was impressive enough to warrant recording like I did during last month's epic storm. I'm still itching to try and record the weather using my Austrian Audio mics in a Blumlein Pair configuration (that's one of the main reasons why I bought them, after all) but the audio I got from a pair of humble MXL 991s in an ORTF setup was surprisingly good.
Today the downpours have been frequent, and torrential—but none of them has lasted for more than five minutes.
The damp has seen the back garden spring into verdant, autumnal life; yesterday morning I noticed that a large clump of Glistening Inkcap mushrooms (Coprinellus micaceus) had appeared in the middle of the lawn. They're allegedly edible, but given that they're described as having little nutritional value and that eating them is "not really worth while" unless you're mixing them in with other mushrooms, I decided I was going to leave them where they were. Today, they're a slimy black pile of goo; they don't call them inkcaps for nothing.
Yesterday I realised I was getting badly stressed out about a number of things (which we don't need to go into right now). So badly stressed, in fact, that only one thing was going to be able to soothe my nerves...
I've loved playing with Lego since I was a toddler. I used to play with it for hours. In recent years I've built quite a few of their flagship sets which I'd been given as presents by my siblings. I've been saving this particular one until I really needed to focus on something that would shut everything else out and yesterday afternoon turned out to be that occasion. It's the Perseverance Mars Rover and the Ingenuity helicopter.
I'm not sure whether I spent the next few hours in Flow or autistic hyperfocus (which isn't surprising, considering that at least one school of thought reckons that they're actually the same thing) but the end result was the same: I felt much better afterwards.
I've been hankering after a Hologram Electronics Microcosm ever since it was launched back in 2020. When I read Sound On Sound's review of one back in 2022 it became a "must have" item and every time I heard the results that my friends got with theirs (and an awful lot of my friends have them) I would tell myself that it was well past time that I bought one, too.
What is it? The heart of it is a loop pedal which can record and play back up to 60 seconds of audio, but it's also a multi-effects unit. It can do weird and wonderful things to the sounds you feed in to it, from multiple, interlocking delays to glitchy, granular processing as well as pitch shifting and reverb, all mashed up together to create truly jaw-dropping waves of unusual sonic textures. I've just plumbed mine in to my studio desk. That's it at the top left.
I suspect I'll be spending most of the next couple of days getting to know what it can do with my setup. I'm looking forward to finding out.
Today's story from the "Tell me you're autistic without telling me you're autistic" department:
Every now and again, my favourite satellite television channels change transponder and disappear from my favourites list on the TV. It bugs the hell out of me. My most-watched channel is the French version of ARTE, which today is showing (amongst other things) a documentary about Dolly Parton, another about the German film director Wim Wenders (which I've already seen; it was fascinating) and travel programmes about Guadelupe, Sicily, and the Okavango Delta in Africa as well as a celebration of Viennese cuisine. The channel does not have commercial breaks. It doesn't show adverts at all. And it's broadcast in HD. You can see why it appeals, can't you? (Their ARTE app is installed on my TV, and that gets used a lot, too.)
Yesterday, its preset disappeared; the channel had moved again, and my TV therefore acts as if that channel no longer exists. There are quite a few "empty" channels that the set treats like this at the moment, so I decided that this meant it was time for me to get the TV to do a complete rescan of what it could pick up. Doing this from scratch is quite an involved process, so it's something I only do every three or four years. In fact it had been so long since I last did it, I'd completely forgotten how to tell my TV which satellites it should be looking for, or which DisEQc signal switches the set to the appropriate LNB on the dish. Fortunately I'd written it down on a piece of paper, which I eventually found after searching for it for quarter of an hour or so, but I'm going to make a note of it here so I can find out what to do more quickly next time.
The appropriate menu item on the TV's settings is under Settings ❘ Watching TV ❘ Channels ❘ Channel Setup ❘ Digital Setup ❘ Satellite Setup ❘ Digital Satellite Tuning. (Is it any wonder I couldn't remember how to get at it?)
The tuning menu allows you to select up to four satellites, but it defaults to just having satellite 1 enabled and the Sony expects to see the Astra 28.3° E constellation. That's understandable, because that's where the UK's Sky and Freesat satellite channels can all be found, but it's no good to me because of course I have to be different (my dish is more than 25 years old). And if you leave the settings menu on Auto you can't change to a different set of satellites. So—and this is the part which I'd forgotten about—I had to set the tuning routine to Manual scan which then let me change Satellite 1 to Astra 19.2° E, enabled with DisEQc channel B, and Satellite 2 to Hotbird 13.0° E, enabled with DisEQc channel A. I'd made a note on the piece of paper to switch the tuning mode back to Auto before I clicked on the Start button to begin the scan, but this time I decided to limit the services that the Sony searched for to just free ones, which are shown in green on those Lyngsat links above. I wanted to see if that made things more manageable when it came to editing the channel list because a full list of channels that the TV can pick up, including the satellite radio ones, runs to more than 3,000 and searching through them to pick out your favourites is incredibly time consuming.
It certainly made a difference, but the scan still took more than ten minutes to complete! After I'd written down the channel numbers of the fifty or so channels I watch most often, I was able to edit the channel list and move my favourites to channels 0001 to 0050. Organised into logical groups, of course.
So, yeah; last night I spent more than an hour organising my TV so I can watch MTV, Comedy Central, and Eurosport in German and Dolly Parton in French with the minimum of effort. And I'll tell you what: watching a selection of television channels from continental Europe doesn't half bring home just how monumentally shit British television is these days...
This week I discovered that the main reason that my hips are so sore at the moment is because of my office chair, which is a few years old now and evidently completely worn out. To be fair, it gets used a lot; I've actually worn through the fabric on the arms. The padding on the seat was never particularly thick, but it has thinned out a lot lately. I've been sitting on a pile of cushions on it for the last few days, and the amount of pain I'm in has reduced noticeably but I think it's time to get rid of it.
For the past couple of years I've had a Herman Miller Aeron chair in my recording studio. I first sat in one when I visited my brother in San Carlos and immediately wanted one for myself (it only took me eleven years to get around to buying one). When I spend the day sitting in that, I really notice how much less pain I'm in. So I've decided to move the Aeron downstairs because after discovering that Herman Miller were running a sale with 25% off the things at the moment I've ordered a Mirra chair for the studio instead.
Take a look at that photo of me sitting in the Big Room at Real World at the top of my music page and you'll understand just why I'd pick that particular model of chair for my recording studio. As well as being environmentally friendly, they are very comfortable indeed...
The more I read up about autism, the more I've realised how much of my own behaviour exhibits profoundly autistic traits. I already knew my social anxiety had become far worse since the pandemic, but I'm just beginning to realise that for me, Covid was the perfect excuse for justifying my tendency to stay at home and simply never go anywhere. After all, if everyone else was doing it too, I wasn't going to seem weird any more, was I? Similarly, my long-standing, deep reluctance to drive anywhere because I would always get highly stressed about finding a parking spot when I got to my destination now has a simple explanation because autistic people often get very upset by unfamiliar environments or by events that they haven't anticipated or planned for, and that describes me perfectly. Sadly, the modern world requires me to endure all of those things on a regular basis—or at least it did when I was still working. I now realise that before 2019 I had exactly the sort of job that was guaranteed to make someone like me incredibly stressed out. The fact that I've effectively been retired since then has meant that I've been able to settle into a daily routine which no longer gets interrupted by occasional business trips to exotic locations like Abu Dhabi or Staines. Honestly, you would not believe what that has done to improve my peace of mind—and, I have no doubt, my quality of life.
Yes, I'm a recluse these days; but I like being a recluse. I'm happy being a recluse. It's better for me.
Most of the time, at least.
So many of the parameters of my life have changed lately. I'm not the person I used to be three months ago, let alone five years ago. Back then, I weighed sixteen stone (101 kg); is it any wonder I used to have difficulty sleeping? Yesterday was a reduced-calorie day for me, and when I weighed myself this morning I'd lost another kilogram in weight. This week I've had to punch new holes in the belt that keeps up my jeans!
What's particularly telling about the change in my mental health over the last couple of months is the change in my sleep habits. I've noticed that the anxiety dreams which used to be an almost nightly occurrence seem to have disappeared; I'm hoping they never come back. However, my run of perfect "sleep scores" over the past week didn't last, and last night my watch grudgingly awarded me a score of 83, telling me that last night I only spent a third of it in Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep—that's the deep, restorative kind when we're not dreaming—and it rated my night as "bad" (on a good night this year, I've been spending half the night in NREM sleep). But I didn't particularly mind, because I had some lovely dreams and woke up in a really good mood.
Back when I first started tracking my sleep in 2018, I was getting scores between 45 and 85 from my watch, and a "bad" night would see the amount of NREM sleep I was getting sitting somewhere around 22%. A score of 34% like I got last night would have been spectacularly good.
I had no idea my life would improve this much once I could stop worrying about work.
It's a new season, a new month, and the same old blog. But the new me is still feeling pretty good; my mental state remains unusually calm and upbeat—which is a complete mystery, given the state of the wider world at the moment. I might not agree that its assessment is entirely accurate, but for the last couple of nights my watch has given me a "sleep score" of 100 (presumably out of 100).
Perhaps one reason why I'm not feeling as stressed this year is because the Fifty/Ninety songwriting challenge I normally do every summer has taken a year off. By the time I reached the closing stretch last year, I was getting really cheesed off with the AI slop lyrics and over-entitled bitching which a few users had decided they were going to flood the site with. I don't miss that at all, and I know the other moderators don't, either. Sadly this does mean that my musical output this summer has dropped off a cliff. At this point in the challenge I would normally have added a bare minimum of forty tracks to my back catalogue; there were years where I came close to doubling that figure and even one where I managed to do so. But in the same way that farmers let a field lie fallow for a year so that it can recover, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
And I've not been entirely inactive, either; yesterday I rewired and rearranged the studio desk to try an alternative method for recording effects (for the audio nerds amongst you, I'd been asked if it was possible to route the effects sends off my mixer to a discrete pair of inputs on the PC's audio interface and record the effects as a separate stereo track—this even involved some carpentry) but the results I got didn't sound anywhere near as good as the old setup, so I've changed the routing back again.
Doing this also showed me that I am too old and decrepit to spend a Sunday afternoon grovelling around underneath my studio desk and it's encouraged me to lose some more weight (although when I weighed myself this morning I was pleased to see I currently weigh 13 stone 11 pounds, or 87 kg).
I can always tell when the humidity gets above 60% here, because the bowl of Demerera sugar I keep in the kitchen for my morning coffee turns from being dry and crunchy back to being moist and soft, like it was when it came out of the packet. It did that this morning. Inside the house at the moment, the humidity stands at 61% and after the weekend's rain, outside it's 68%. This appears to have brought the bugs out: my right arm has a couple of rather itchy insect bites on it this morning.
If you read my remarks in yesterday's blog it'll come as no surprise to learn that today is the first day of meteorological autumn. It feels like it, too; by 11 am the temperature in the back garden had only just managed to reach 20°C (68°F)—rather different from the mid-thirties we were experiencing here a few weeks ago. It's much more pleasant, and it will have helped my sleep scores a lot.
I'm going to need to spend quite a lot of time getting the garden into shape for the winter, though. The cherry tree needs pruning and I have a bit of a brambles problem...