Reading

1-800-fuck-it

Hi, yes, hello? Yeah, I'm encountering some bullshit and I wanted to get on the schedule for an Adult, can you tell me what the availability in my area is? Sure, I can hold.

...

Wow, you're booking that far out? No, it makes sense, I get it, can you also put me on the cancellation list? Like, I know it's a long shot but I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.

Okay, yeah, you've got my contact information and credit card on file, nothing's changed, sounds good, I'll see you then.

Which is to say, I tried to clean my dishwasher filter, and it was disgusting beyond words and yet the dishwasher is still not cleaning my dishes effectively, and I want an adultier adult.

Entry tags:

film,
music

Googling around for discussions of Boneland gets me a reminder of Cocteau's Orphée, a forgotten fave from my 20s. Probably seen in that same Film Odyssey series that introduced me to Kurosawa that was another 'opposite of nail in coffin' (unconscious impetus?) that led me almost twenty years later to go to Japan. Seventeen years is nothing now but then it was several lifetimes. Anyway, Orphée. Brief clips on YouTube suggest I might find it reeeally overdone now, and Jean Marais is entirely Too Much. But. But. I would like to see it again.

Equally I would like to go to some upcoming concerts hereabouts. Ballets Trocadero, or a candlelight and surely truncated Magic Flute. The latter is at a local church where I could enquire about how disabled seating works with first come, first served. The former is way down Yonge St and pricey, and I have these dental bills still piling up. But I'd like to be out and about again because this crippled mindset is getting me down.

Will I read Boneland? Am disinclined, especially if I'm supposed to think that all of the preceding books is Colin's dying hallucination, or Colin refusing to remember being raped, or something equally unpleasant.

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crafts: spinning

a 3-ply yarn

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cooking,
recipes

Culinary

This week's bread: the Country Oatmeal aka Monastery Loaf from Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno's Bread (2:1:1 wholemeal/strong white/pinhead oatmeal), turned out nicely if perhaps a little coarser than the recipe anticipates (medium oatmeal has been for some reason a bit hard to come by).

Friday night supper: ven pongal (South Indian khichchari), v nice.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, texture seemed a bit off, possibly the dough could have been a bit slacker?

Today's lunch: the roasted Mediterranean vegetable thing - whole garlic cloves, red onion, fennel, red bell pepper, baby peppers, baby courgettes and aubergine (v good), served with couscous + raisins.

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

brewsternorth!

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music: composition

sampled orchestral mockups + music production: part 1: brief demo of engraving software + playback

(cross-posted to

communal_creators)

Earlier:
- part 0: preliminaries (includes partial glossary of terms)

Watch on YouTube

I know there are a lot of people who haaaaaate being forced to sit through video but since audio playback is inherent to the enterprise...This is under a minute, promise.

This is a brief demonstration of the opening of one of my compositions partially engraved (~sheet music typesetting) in Dorico. The two industry-standard engraving apps in media composition scoring are Dorico and Sibelius; Finale used to be a third but was sunsetted to much consternation.

If you come from classical music (especially classical orchestral music), you may be ??? about the score formatting. This is because scores for session orchestra and concert/classical orchestra have different formatting! (See part 0: preliminaries for more detail as to why). Differences for session orchestra you see here include:

- Score is in C (NOT a transposing score for the conductor - nota bene, transposing is "allowed" for octaves), but we won't have e.g. horn in F or trumpet in Bb. ( Read more... )

As for playback:

- Guess what, Dorico and Sibelius at the level of orchestral scores are spendy. :]

- I'm using NotePerformer, which is the standard higher-quality playback engine, especially if you don't have time to mock it up in the DAW (or you're an art/concert composer for whom a mockup is not part of your workflow). But that's also money (~$130 USD).

NotePerformer is pretty credible with a lot of orchestral instruments. You still have to massage its output. For example, in Sibelius [not shown] you can set playback to molto espressivo (LOTS OF FEELING) vs. senza espressivo (NO FEELINGS EVER!!!) (etc). My experience is that particular instruments can be less "real"-sounding and the "vocalists" (both SATB choir and associated "solo" voices) are absolutely terrible, as in "my vacuum cleaner sings more credibly than this" terrible.

Aside: There are some good vocal VST libraries for specific use cases. I hate that I am often able to straight-up identify "Oh yeah, XYZ floating ethereal ~Celtic Twilight vibes soprano 'ahhh' ululation in this trailer/score/whatever was $SPECIFIC_VST_LIBRARY" because, apparently, I have no life; but this is not unusual in this field.

I know at least one full-time composer/orchestrator/musician who straight-up bounces NotePerformer output and then processes that in the DAW (reverb etc) and, you know, this person makes a living doing this. So that's one route one can take.

Why, you ask, can't we just export this score-stuff into a DAW with all the fancy (...spendy) VST instruments and "paste in" nicer/more individualized instruments? Dorico (and Sibelius) do in fact export to MIDI and MusicXML. [1] This is a very reasonable question that will be the topic of the next walkthrough (part 2), mainly because it's a surprisingly (annoying) complicated topic as to why this is rarely straightforward. (Let me tell you all about negative track delay...)

[1] Missed these glossary items earlier! ( brief explanations of MIDI and MusicXML )

Happy to answer questions, although I have no idea if anyone else finds this interesting. :p

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Neural Text to Speech and an AFB AI Survey

The American Foundation for the Blind is researching AI:

( details on how to participate )

In addition to the environmental and ethical violations which LLMs/AIs depend on, the endless hype and inaccurate performance make me shudder and growl. Yet I admit I’ve used neural text-to-speech voices for casual audio reading. The neural voices require an internet connection and they lose intelligibility at speed. They’re best as substitutes for human readers.

Blind computer users set their on-device system text-to-speech (TTS) at high speeds. Three hundred to five hundred words per minute are often cited. For screen reader applications, a robotic voice is a feature, enabling bits to flow from device to brain with minimal interpretation.

Neural voices produce much higher quality than system-level TTS. When fed appropriately coded input, they can laugh, whisper, and sound sarcastic as well as "analyze" an essay to produce a "podcast" dialog between two synthetic discussants. Some samples here: https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/

But I know well the expertise that skilled human narrators bring to their work—whether it’s commercial audiobook production, volunteer alternative-format creation, or podfic elves making magic. I don’t want a world where those jobs are outsourced to computers.

On the gripping hand, I remember when skilled Linotype operators--many Deaf--were obviated by computerized systems where reporters keyed their own copy. I used the bridge technology of phototypesetting, as well as pioneering desktop publishing. It's expected that admin workers now create flyers and graphs and charts.

Have you tried neural voices? Recognized them on YouTube or TikTok or your recent tech support call? Do you have thoughts for or against?

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crafts: spinning

not good spinning demo: EEW 6.1

Watch on YouTube

Dreaming Robots' Electric Eel Wheel 6.1 e-spinner with some sacrificial Rambouillet/Gotland wool blend. Sorry about the mess; too hot to go outside with this. I don't claim this is good spinning, just a brief demonstration of Getting The E-Spinner To Do A Thing.

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Rubbish

Seem to have been seeing a cluster of things about litter, and picking it up, lately, what with this one Lake District: Family shouted at for picking up litter, and the thing I posted recently about the young woman who was snarking on the Canals and Rovers Trust about what she perceived as her singlehanded mission to declutter the local canal bank: "Elena might feel alone in tackling London's litter waste", and then this week's 'You Be The Judge' in the weekend Guardian is on a related theme:

Should my girlfriend stop picking up other people’s litter?

(She is at least throwing it away in a responsible fashion: I worry about the couple whose flat is being cluttered up with culinary appliances where one feels maybe the ones that aren't actually being used anymore could be rehomed via charity shops before they are buried under an avalanche of redundant ricecookers etc).

As far as litter and clutter goes, National Trust tears down Union flag from 180-year-old monument. Actually, carefully removed, and we think there are probably conservation issues involved: quote from NT 'We will assess whether any damage has been caused to the monument'. See also White horse checked for any damage caused by flag. We do not think respect and care for heritage is uppermost in the minds of people who do these jelly-bellied flagflapping gestures.

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Even housewives weren't necessarily exclusively housewifing

Okay, my dearios, I am sure all dear rdrs are with me that tradwives are not trad, they are deploying an aesthetic loosely based on vague memories of the 1950s - and meedja representations at that - and some very creepy cultish behaviour - they are not returning to some lovely Nachral State -

And that as I bang on about a lot, women have been engaged in all kinds of economic activity THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF HISTORY since economic activity became A Thing.

Why tradwives aren’t trad: The housewife is a Victorian invention. History shows us women’s true economic power

I have a spot of nitpickery to apply - it rather skips over and elides the move from the household economy into factories e.g., leading to 'separate spheres' with wife stuck at home (and even that was a very blurry distinction, I mutter); and also the amount of exploitative homeworking undertaken by women of the lower classes (often to the detriment of any kind of 'good housekeeping').(Not saying middle-class women didn't also find ways of making a spot of moolah to eke out household budget.)

And of course a lot of tradwives are actually performing as economically productive influencers: TikTok tradwives: femininity, reproduction, and social media - in a tradition of women who made a very nice living out of telling other women how to be domestic goddesses, ahem ahem.

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crafts: spinning

not-good spinning: demo of spinning silk on a treadle wheel

Watch on YouTube

Ashford Traveller (single treadle although you can see that, Scotch tension). Spinning mulberry (bombyx) silk from combed top.

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

davidgillon and

surexit!

Entry tags:

rl_25

(no subject)

Well, that was A Day. Starting with A Night. Bed early because alarm set for 9 and then couldn't sleep and then leg cramps (more magnesium!) and then mosquito bites itched and then recurring nightmare of stabbing to death not only my HS best buddy but her brother-in-law as well. And then it was 7:30 and I knew if I went back to sleep the alarm would rip me awake and I'd feel exhausted for the rest of the day. So I did an hour of stretch and strengthen instead, got up and had breakfast etc etc, brushed teeth and waited for cab. Who arrived early and even with traffic got me to the dentist in 25 minutes. Wasted time in Shoppers and then had a 90+ minute appointment where she sawed off my crown and cleaned the cavity under it and put a temporary crown on it and told me not to drink anything hot until the freezing wore off and to chew on the other side.

I had a vague notion of maybe walking up to Canadian Tire and looking at tree loppers, or taking the subway up to Yonge and walking from there, or something. But warm humid September, that sleep-deprived night, and 90 minutes in a dentist's chair meant everything hurt, and what didn't hurt was stiff. So went over to University to get the subway up to St George, and thence to Bathurst for sushi. But the sign said the Bathurst elevators weren't working. OK, I'll have sushi at Spadina then. But the sign said the Spadina elevators weren't working either. Which meant going to Ossington and walking back. And if I have to go to Ossington, by god I'm going to have my yearly Big Mac there, and damn both the calories and the boycott. Which did, but it was still a weary walk home, and the whole thing got me a bare 5000 steps.

I trust I will sleep well tonight.

Entry tags:

Mingled yarn of life

Text today from my general practice to book Covid + flu jabs - actually in a months time, but I now have a slot booked.

***

Having been moaning on over at bluesky about scholars these days not acknowledging existing (older) historiography, Dept of Preening Gratification was coming across footnote cite to 30 year-old co-authored work as 'A key starting point' for certain 'productive considerations' within the field.

***

On the other prickly paw, I am still failing to get up to a proper swing at the essay review - keep niggling and picking at the bit I've already done.

Partly due to Interruptions happening.

Also partly due to not sleeping terribly well this week for some reason.

***

Discovered today that I had somehow acquired an ebook of recent work on subject I have had far too much to do with and had totally forgotten about it. Looking up an area of Mi Pertikler Xpertize, o dear, a number of niggling Errours.

***

Attended a webinar the other day where someone claimed that a certain class of records did not survive in respect of the lower orders on account They Could Not Write, and I was more, no, it's an issue of preservation, what about those postcards that I spoke about on a TV programme once - but that is such an annoying story, what DID happen to the cards after the filming? - apart from the flaunting of Being Meedja Personality, so decided not to raise my virtual hand.

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Oh, this tiny video says so much about working!

Open captions

my brief audio description

Asian man faces camera, sitting at laptop with white earbuds and animated face. Another person's back enters the screen. "This motion" is him pointing to his ear then the laptop and nodding. The picture on his desk is just the words "food" and "healthcare"

Stream: ( right on here )

When you want to view a YouTube short in the classic YouTube screen (with the controls you're familiar with!) you replace the word "shorts" in the link with the word "watch"

I first saw this and the link was youtube.com/shorts/I908J9_u0WE

To use the classic horizontal player go to youtube.com/watch/I908J9_u0WE

Edited due to a strange Markdown bug: when I create a bare link with angle brackets, uppercase letters are transformed into lower case.

<https://youtube.com/watch/i908j9_u0we> becomes https://youtube.com/watch/i908j9_u0we (and the video ID string in the code example are I908J9_u0WE)

but when I create a Markdown link [youtube.com/watch/I908J9_u0WE](https://youtube.com/watch/I908J9_u0WE) the case remains as typed.

spinning WIP

Or: if your goal is threadweight/cobweb, why silk fiber is not quite as profligate an expense as you might think:

The white is mulberry bombyx silk; the tawny stuff was my briefly foraying into eri silk. This is for personal use/enjoyment (needle lace) so it's fine that I'm wandering off like this. This is several hours of admittedly inefficient spinning, since I take frequent breaks so there's a very start-stop nature to it, but because the spin is so fine, this bobbin is...not very full.

This is what I have REMAINING in 2 oz. of mulberry silk combed top (about $25 USD). It exploded out of the package (typical) and also, it barely looks like I've even used any of it. As it stands, I suspect I'm going to be spinning this combed top for the next 30,000 years. :)

That said, silk is my absolute favorite to spin and I prefer spinning threadweight, so this is not a hardship.

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

daegaer and

syderia!

Ex Tenebris TTRPG on Kickstarter! (I'm writing a scenario for this)

Ex Tenebris: a gothic space opera TTRPG [Kickstarter, already funded!].

Beyond the dark emptiness of space, beyond dreaming, lies the Tenebrium. Only you can unearth its mysteries, defeat the twisted horrors that lurk there, and keep humanity from becoming prey.

In Ex Tenebris, you play a ragtag team of investigators, protecting the Republic of Stars from terrifying supernatural threats. You will face sorcerers and cults, dark technology from lost civilisations and the slobbering terrors lurking in the nightmare realm of the Tenebrium.

Ex Tenebris is a complete TTRPG containing all the rules, setting and scenarios that you need to embark on adventures amongst the stars.

[...]

Ex Tenebris takes inspiration from the grotesque imagery of the Aliens movies, the existential dread of Event Horizon, the mysticism of Dune, the dark gothic setting of Warhammer 40,000, and the weird science/magic fusion of Ninefox Gambit.

- Josh Fox, lead designer & writer
- Becky Annison, writer
- Juan Ochoa, illustrator
- Nathan D. Paoletta, layout and graphic design
- Andriy Lukin, logo design
- Jog Brogzin, cartographer
- Chirag Asnani, writer
- Sarah Doom, writer
- Eleanor Hingley, writer
- Kieron Gillen, writer
- Yoon Ha Lee, writer (howdy!)
- Tejas Oza, writer
- Galen Pejeau, writer

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Warm September leads to brain melt. Dentist calls with an opening for tomorrow at 11:45, I say ok, half an hour later am unsure if it's 11:45 or 12:45 or surely not 10:45. Tomorrow is also garbage day so hope the trucks come at their usual 9-something and the street is clear by 10:45.

Warm September also makes things hurt, but filled a third bag with seedlings and dragged them all to the front sidewalk.

Finished Weirdstone, am reading Gomrath, finished Charles Lenox 3 and started on 4. Desultorily reading a collection of Chinese cheng'yu, (usually) four character proverbs, idioms, sayings, whatever. These are about plants; I have other volumes for animals etc. Won't remember them but at least I've seen them once. Of course reading them suggests I should start reviewing kanji yet again because of the 'dammit I *know* that one but can't remember its meaning' factor (which is always different in Chinese but-of-course.) But warm September: can't be arsed.

Here in the autumn Ghost Tide I'm taken back almost 60 years to first year uni. I wish I'd kept my Fine Arts textbooks-- and can't think why I'd have abandoned them-- because I'm all kinds of nostalgic for black figure pottery and archaic Greek statuary. Though, when I google, I find several kouroi and korai that hadn't been discovered back in '67. Semper aliquid novum, I suppose.

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alpaca adventures, cont'd

Test spin of small experimental alpaca floof batch.

For lagniappe, the completed smol woven object made from my handspun that's headed to

eller, mostly wool/silk/angelina blends (both colorways). :3