Oily dark

Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding is also one of my favorite games. I grew up in a Metal Gear Solid household — I vividly remember watching my older brother flipping through MGS1’s triple-decker CD case, wondering where the third disc could possibly have gone. More vividly, I remember, in that same basement, the PS3’s gently whirring fan, the console’s heat warming the perpetually cold tiled floor, how the damp basement’s humidity hung tensely as I scoured Paris as Old Snake. I still whistle the song from that mission whenever I find myself outside on a rainy night.

Something about me that’s fundamental to how I move through life, and likewise something I struggle immensely to talk about, is that I have OCD. OCD isn’t fun — mine sticks to things I care about, trying to tear shreds of ultimately worthless insight out of nearly everything I do to find an answer to a fear that I’m not a good person, and deserve neither love nor life. Writing this hurts, fills my usual behind-the-sternum pit of obsessive turmoil with nauseous dread. Stick with me, here.

OCD thrives on hope — it lives to kill it. At its worst, it sticks to trivial things like breathing or hearing, and wears away at normal, rational thought until all that’s left is all that’s felt: fear. It keeps you stuck in place, glued to the couch, hiding under the sheets of your bed, waiting for time to pass. There’s no before, there’s no after, there’s only a miserable, choking during, perpetually threatening to swallow you whole and last forever.

Thumbs up

Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding is a game open to interpretation. I’ve recommended it to some two-dozen people, and what I usually hear back is that they don’t like walking simulators. They’re not entirely wrong — the game is a game about walking and traversal, how to get places and get there in one piece. As the game progresses, traversal gets easier with things like bionic legs, motorbikes, roads, and jumping pickup trucks. Eventually, you can build long-range, gravity-defying ziplines that make getting around even easier.

But getting around is never actually easy, given the state of the country our protagonist, Sam Porter Bridges, finds himself in. After events I won’t spoil, the US (and, presumably, the world) decays into a few disconnected hubs of life built in the remains of cities from the before times. You only ever encounter a handful of people as you cross nearly the entire country: the world is big, empty, and full of things that can very easily kill you. Your job, evident in your name, is twofold — Porter, in that you deliver packages on foot, and Bridges, in that your unique circumstances and biological connection to the paranormal blight that turns the dead into wandering, detonating spirits, holds the key to reunifying the country. Unwillingly, you’re emotionally and physically burdened with the weight of what remains of the world.

Light shining

Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding is best understood as a game about putting one foot in front of the other. In Death Stranding, life persists after death dies. Strings are pulled, vendettas are had, antimatter bombs are delivered, Conan O’Brian wears an otter cosplay. Life, its core foundations seemingly fucked beyond any specter of repair, goes on. Miasmic washes of undeath swallow picturesque green-gray landscapes while people order pizza. The gig economy persists, and Sam still needs to get out there and endure the near-endless litany of bullshit that comes with a day job.

Death Stranding is a game about hardship. It’s also a game, in its own nuanced way, about optimism and persistence. Energy is a valuable resource in the game, fueling everything from your bionic legs to your spring-loaded trucks. It gradually and inevitably decays, threatening to lampoon you with 200lbs of cargo strapped to your back at the bottom of a gulley, surrounded by marauders eager for your gear. You’ll find yourself in situations requiring you to march almost vertically uphill towards solitary bunkers, or teetering across ladders laid precariously over rushing streams. You’ll run out of energy, your best-laid plans will fall through. You will fall, your cargo will break, and you will get hurt; you’ll likely die.

But you always wake up. No matter how sideways things get, how many rounds you take to the chest, how much luggage you lose to entropic rain, you always wind up in a bed by the end of the day. Blood and ammo replenished, you near-silently arrange cargo on your back and march across the American wasteland every single day. As you jog (or drive) from place to place, you grow deeply familiar with the landscape, and find your own preferred, vernacular paths across what at first seems entirely insurmountable.

You and you alone are responsible for your job. And, through it all, you see to it that your job gets done.

What it takes to be a hero

Sam Porter Bridges is one of my favorite heroes in fiction. He has aphenphosmphobia — a fear of being touched. He struggles immensely to form meaningful connections with people, hampered further by his deeply uncomfortable, nearly antisocial mannerisms. He begrudgingly wakes up for work, risks his life to drop off boxes, and falls on wherever he can find a bed, visibly exhausted and worse-for-wear. He keeps pace in a world nearly devoid of hope, step after step. After a life of going through the motions, he finds a reason to keep going in the form of a Bridge Baby: a stillborn infant trapped between life and death, kept semi-alive for the sole purpose of detecting paranormal activity.

Sam’s Bridge Baby, BB, is due for destruction after being labelled defective. Holding the future in his hands, Sam finds something to fight for: no matter how defective, how damaged, how doomed, he fights relentlessly to keep BB alive. All the while, he uses his blood to reconnect a broken nation, building lasting bonds with the two dozen-ish people left in the country. Intentionally or not, he builds a close-knit family purely by getting through the work day, the dozens of tiny, subtle nuances of daily life reinvigorating the world with a sense of purpose and emotional intimacy. With what feels like only a handful of people, Sam’s work leaves in its wake a community of people sharing human contact for the first time in a lifetime.

Keeping on

As someone with OCD, Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding is one of the best representations of how hope slowly inches forward, coagulating to pierce through the deepest dark. It’s ugly, it’s meandering, it takes shape in random, unforeseen places in day-to-day life. It’s done with other people, often entirely coincidentally. It’s stressful, it’s painful, and, more often than not, inches from hopeless. But it gets done even when you’re not trying to get it done — to live is to go through hell and come out the other end, time and time again.

Death Stranding is a game where you keep going. Whether you want it to or not, things will change. You will adapt, you will live, and, if you keep on keeping on, you will find your place and thrive — all it takes is getting out of bed in the morning. The future will come, and you will be essential in shaping it. You’re human: you don’t have a choice.

Don’t be so serious

Any time I carry heavy backpacks, or sling laundry bags across my chest to lug to the laundromat, or fill out my fishing kit and slip assorted tackle boxes into their respective pockets, I like to tell my partner I’m “Sam Porter Bridgers-ing it.” One of the core tenants of coping with OCD is to take it with you: your thoughts and fears aren’t things you can drop. A life well lived is one of a burden bore — you can always survive the weight. All you need to do is to keep moving.

In a world where art is well agreed upon to fit firmly into the demarkation of minimalism and maximalism, Nolan is comfortable in his role as a maximalist. The Dark Knight trilogy, my personal favorite triad of Batman movies (and certainly the most straight-faced), cultivated a certain mystique among Zillenials that Nolan’s movies are the cinematic line-in-the-sand: beyond them lie work more akin to products than film productions. Scorcese is much more eloquent in his analysis of the Disney monoculture; we’re here to talk about sound.

Reader beware: Odyssey (2026, not the poem) spoilers yonder

Deafening Silence

Having spent a critical four years of my life at a Catholic high school proud of its commitment to teaching the classics, Homer’s Odyssey was one of my many Summer reading selections. Some parts of it I recall down to the verse, others are a vague dactylic smear. As one of the developers behind a still-ongoing project titled Between Scylla and Charybdis, and as an Italian-American that found ancient Greece’s paranoid fear of Sicily to be very, deeply funny, the tale of where the Mediterranean’s maw and a fabled Greek monster meet planted itself firmly in memory. Moments before Odysseus’s crew, both in the poem and the movie, steer away from Charybdis, they plug their ears with wax and sail passed the Sirens, their song legendary for tantalizing shipmen towards splintery, waterlogged ends along spearhead-shaped crags splitting the sea itself.

Odysseus, forever tempting fate both as Matt Damon and the subject of drunken bard’s tales, ties himself to the mast and gives his men instructions: don’t untie him, no matter what he says, or does, or how loud he screams, or how deep his sobs. Seated for the movie, I was wondering the entire time how they’d handle the Siren Song — a chorus? Noise? A celebrity cameo?

“Sirens,” bookended by reverb-soaked blobs of choral lament, primarily takes shape as a handful of breathy, ancient Greek flutes. The melody is simple, the recording free from effect; a pause remains where the musicians draw a sharp breath. You can nearly hear the profile of the room the musicians recorded in. In a movie carved from myth, where god’s reign and monsters abound, “Sirens” is distinctly, vulnerably human.

The Shape of Sound

On one of my many hours mindlessly pouring through the Reels spoon-fed to me by the folks at Meta, who, more often than not, wield their algorithms at me as weapons to separate me from my cash, I wound up on a fun profile. A music critic who goes by blustre, one of his schticks involving spinning a Wheel of Fortune-esque wheel, on which were a smattering of musical genres he’d never sat down to listen to. Most of the genres took the loose shape of EDM — the author, with several reels devoted to ninajirachi, definitely had a musical type. In one reel, his wheel landed on lowercase.

If you’re unfamiliar with the genre, take a listen below.

Lowercase’s form is maximally minimalist (I hate these descriptors so fucking much, but they really do fit): defined primarily by texture and subtlety, traditional musical structures like melody and recognizable rhythm are forgone in favor of approaching near-imperceptible levels of volume. Something unique to the genre is that many of its constituent artists include recommended listening levels with their releases, asking listeners to keep their music only barely audible for full effect.

The reelsmith gave the genre a good college try; arguably, he gave it an entirely fair and pretty comprehensive survey. Lowercase wound up receiving a 6/10, a score much more generous than I anticipated for a very truly experimental genre. The comments, as expected of anything on Instagram, were truly asinine.

The Thesis (Not to be confused with Theseus)

There’s a really wonderful parallel between Lowercase and Ludwig Göransson’s quietest moment of his discography that makes the “Sirens” work: relativity and context. In a single film are two extremes — a genuinely deafening wail, and a pensive moment juxtaposing 4 flutes with a shot of Matt Damon screaming so violently, his voice is audibly damaged once the music fades out. It’s an unexpectedly brilliant moment showcasing dynamic range, or the concrete, measurable difference in volume in a given source of audio, in the filmography of a man suited to blowing out speakers with SFX and Hans Zimmer scores.

Lowercase’s thesis likewise stands in juxtaposition to loudness, especially in the wake of the Loudness Wars. We all continue to feel the fallout of the Loudness War: increasingly, the standards behind mixing and mastering in mainstream music prioritize raw loudness and razor’s edge use of compression, to build streamable products made as much for laptop speakers as they are for hi-fi setups. What we lost among the trenches in the War is the use of amplitude as artistic expression, a tool as useful for conveying meaning as the scale in which a melody takes shape. Now, troughs and peaks in amplitude serve more so to maximize dopamine, with moments of particular loudness reserved only for the most memorable parts of a given track. Throw any pop song from the last 5 years into Audacity and take a look at the waveform: you’ll almost certainly be able to visually identify where the chorus begins and ends by an overall bump in amplitude.

The Odyssey’s “Sirens,” and a vast majority of Lowercase, are striking in what they omit. Ample space is left to take things in, and, while fundamentally different in their ultimate purpose (“Sirens” offers aural respite while offloading tension almost entirely to the visuals; Lowercase builds striking, mindful soundscapes à la musique concrète), both are worthy counterpoints to bog-standard approaches that push limiters as far as they go.

I’ll be honest: I hate a lot of how Nolan’s work approaches sound. Interstellar is an aptly egregious example of shell shock from the Loudness War. It’s a good (if not great) movie, save for how horribly, god-awfully mixed nearly all of the audio is during any of the films several narrative and emotional peaks. He, at least when Hans Zimmer was on his team, often sacrificed vocal clarity for musical weight, leaving dialogue audibly struggling for breathing room under the score. His last two films are much more mature in their theatrical mixing, which can likely be chalked up to leaving serial egoist Zimmer and his team of uncredited interns behind in favor of a Swede with a real gift.

Last Stanzas

It isn’t lost on me, the deep irony of comparing a hotly-anticipated, immensely well-funded, textbook film retelling of one of history’s most enduring stories to some of the most deeply experimental, challenging, and intimate pieces of music ever released. I like to think this is the only blog where you can find an absolute fucking nerd mention Ludwig Göransson and Steve Roden in the same sentence.

Nonetheless: I kinda forgot I could write about sound until the day before I wrote this. Finding a beat and trying to figure out what I’m most comfortable writing about, especially as I’m building out my skillsets around reporting, has been, in a word, tough. You do things like forget you have a lifetime’s worth of academic specialty in sound when you’re chasing pitches for things like “Can you really fly fish in Central Park?”

Before we part, I’d like to thank Ed and Celia for their support of Broad Channel. I suspect this is the closest one can get to having artistic patrons. I am truly, genuinely, eternally grateful for the subscriptions. If you, dear reader who is presumably neither Ed nor Celia, would also like to be the object of undying affection, consider throwing me a few bucks to fund my all-consuming fishing habit by choosing to become a monthly subscriber.

Thanks, y’all. You can all look forward to interviews with some neat people, coming relatively soon.

I’m Jay Tobin, and you’re tuned into Broad Channel — where I yap, you read, and we both improve my SEO.

It’s been a bit, since sometime in 2025 (which 1. feels like yesterday and 2. was when this was a longstanding blog for Dayflower Studio). In the downtime between blog previous and blog current, I’ve been busy absolutely stuffing my wallet with slips of laminated paper adorned with my name, address, and little qualifying tidbits I’ve been collecting like infinity stones: certifications and licenses.

What.

Since the start of 2026, (my) life’s been changing fast: I write now, I fish now, and I’ve been hard at work brushing up on backend and mobile development ahead of building and helping to launch [REDACTED: MORE INFO SOON]. In the general turmoil reshaping my life as one would a fistful of polymer clay before throwing it in the oven to imbue it with purpose at around 350 degrees Fahrenheit, I’ve found a new special little interest in amassing an ever-growing stack of certs attesting to expertise, in fields both broad and exceedingly specific.

Expert Testimony

It started innocent enough: a buddy of mine from college reached out asking if I’d be willing to lend a hand to a lawyer; specifically, if I could offer some guidance on recording and making sense of some audio. The endeavor was immensely and intensely interesting, as someone who’s made several passes at turning audio into a career (recall, dear reader, that Dayflower initially started as a way to slap a silly little sticker on my Max for Live devices). The case needed an audio expert to gather and analyze site-specific recordings, something that I, as a field recording nerd, knew how to do well. I did not anticipate, however, that the case would require me to testify as an expert witness. More than that: I would need to show demonstrable proof of expertise in audio forensics for my testimony to hold any weight.

I hit the ground running. After some digging, I chose one of the dozen private agencies offering test that dangle certification from a fishing line (this is foreshadowing) directly in your face with comprehensive, seemingly insurmountable syllabi.

A month and a half of study later, I took an online test that required I give my test instructor, halfway across the globe, a tour of my home office with my webcam to verify I hadn’t taped test materials to the wall or under my desk (lamentably, I forgot to wear socks to the test. My dogs are inextricably bound to the official, recorded process of becoming a licensed forensics expert). Two hours long, the test, a comprehensive survey of all knowledge one would need to recognize spoofs, verify authenticity, and rigorously study and analyze both audio and video to ultimately submit as evidence along the chain of custody, was an exhausting endeavor in recalling the importance of bitrates, video codecs, and .jpg aberrations. I ultimately passed, after an excruciating hour and 45 minutes. Finally equipped to offer testimony capable of holding water in court, I found a spark of pride printing out my certification attesting to my status as a Digital Audio and Video Forensics Expert.

My testimony wound up not being needed on the case.

Flukes, among other fish

A few months later, a good friend of mine, while on a peaceful walk through Prospect Park at the peak of migration season, brought up outdoorsy hobbies. Eyeing a summer tanager (which I mistakenly told him was a Scarlet Tanager (sorry Jake)), I mentioned something about fishing, and how I “think I used to be good at it.” He corrected me — I was lucky.

I found that, ultimately, I was pissed. Having spent a day at Broad Channel in Queens reporting for my piece with Current Affairs, I dropped by a local bait and tackle shop and bought a combo rod and reel, questionably useful either in fresh or saltwater. Eager to prove him wrong, I bussed to Sunset Park to register for a joint fresh and saltwater fishing license, which I readily nestled into the back of my wallet before slipping my debit card across the counter to buy hooks I would later learn were hilariously oversized.

There will surely be another blog one of these days on the spectacular mindfulness afforded by hobby fishing — the attention to knots, unleaded weights, tight lines, the diets and habits of endemic species, and their proper care and handling. This post isn’t that, and is instead content to convey the fact that, in my dozens of hours fishing across the city’s boroughs, I’ve caught 4 fish. One was a summer flounder, a fluke. I now have strong opinions on plastic baits. I bought a baitcaster, and mastered the art of untangling birds nests.

I’ve spent so much fucking money on this hobby.

Olivia Rodrigo — Driver’s License

For those who’ve known me since my pre living-in-Brooklyn era, you know I never got my driver’s license. That changed last week when I finally figured out how to parallel park. It took me only 10 years to get the hang of (9 years and 6 months to vow I’d never get behind the wheel again, and 6 months to just drive a damn car because I fish now and the fish are where trains aren’t).

If you need a ride somewhere in the city, especially in some of the quieter, more pedestrian-and-bike friendly neighborhoods in the city, get an Uber. I’m only down to drive across suburbia. Maybe to a beach.

Olivia Rodrigo — Boater’s License

Finding myself with an evening’s worth of downtime during an impromptu DC trip while laying across a couch in a damp basement AirBnB, I took the 8 hour course required by the state of New York to become a responsible, legal boat operator. I don’t own a boat. Hit me up if you do.

Olivia Rodrigo — License to Fish within Reservoirs Serving New York City

You need a whole separate permit to fish in the freshwater reservoirs that serve the city, of which there are actually very, very many across the lower Hudson Valley and outlying waterways. I just signed up for it yesterday, and will promptly be using it to try my hand at landing a smallmouth bass or two. Wish me luck.

Blog in review: I’m definitely forgetting some certifications

All of this to say: I’m running out of things to be licensed in, and am open to pitches on what to niche thing to specialize in next.

All of this to actually say: I’m restarting this blog as a jumping off point for taking a real, meaningful shot as a reporter interested specifically in climate justice across the country’s many gorgeous, irreplaceable, and horribly at-risk wetlands, and the folks and creatures living within them. Further blogs will surely come about the aches and pains associated with the pitching process, carving out a beat, and the usual points of inevitable friction along the path to growing comfortable as an independent journalist. Broad Channel is exactly what it says: a broad repository of essays, stories, and thoughts to come — investigative, obnoxiously introspective, and everything in between.

Stick around. This next chapter should be very, very interesting.

Here are the five things keeping me going through a rather mild but nonetheless annoying headcold this week.

Number 1: The New York Mets

It’s all about da Mets. I was gonna put the anime Haikyuu! here, which I’ve been binging, but only because I finally caught up on all 1100+ episodes of One Piece. This raises the crucial question: would Monkey D. Luffy be a Mets fan? While I can’t say for certain, I can absolutely guarantee 4Kids-dub Sanji would love the Yankees.

Number 2: Helldivers 2

I know the Helldivers hype train left months ago, but recent updates have made the game a ton of fun for returning players. I’m a huge fan of how physics is really your worst enemy, from the realistic weightiness of recoiless rifles to being flung into the stratophere by an errant missile. My biggest issue is that there still isn’t a binding for an exclamation à la Deep Rock Galactic’s devoted “Rock and Stone” button.

Number 3: Sudafed

Specifically the combo Sudafed/Mucinex my partner picked up for me. They might only last four hours, but it’s four hours of the clearest sinuses you’ll ever have.

Number 4: Steam

As in hot evaporated water. If you ever have chest or sinus congestion, buy some eucalyptus essential oil, put a dozen-ish drops on the floor of your shower, crank the heat all the way up, and breathe. As the back of my newly-bought eucalyptus bottle insists, it’s an “at home Spa Experience.”

Number 4: Soup and Spicy Food

I had some pho two nights ago that cured me for a day. Cannot emphasize enough what good pho can do in a rough spot. Don’t be afraid to just absolutely douse it in sriracha and japalenos or chillis.

And that’s that!

Maybe next week I’ll actually have something to say? Maybe not. Definitely seeing the value in listicles here.

File sharing across different computers? Incredible. Built-in version control? Superb. Ability to leverage the greater internet of things to run an office-worth of hardware from a single laptop? Sublime.

Getting files from a Mac to a Windows computer over LAN? Nightmare.

Heading Back to Tennessee, Jed

My partner’s dad runs a construction company out in Nashville. His office is a small-ish farm home on 50 acres of centuries-old trees and tall, lush grasses, through which 2 rivers, a handful of horses, and a small army of cows roam. There’s nearly no car traffic on the single-lane road to get there, the closest store is a combination dollar store/gas station, and at night, the stars and constellations are truly boundless. Having just landed on a flight originating in Brooklyn, my first few moments on the farm were as they usually were: relishing the fresh air, trying to identify tall prairie grasses, and bewilderment at the number of bluebirds whizzing past between tall oaks.

I spent the last weekend on this sprawling oasis in a too-dark room without any overhead light, running back-and-forth from at-home-office to office trying to get a local file sharing network set up for a man who’d much, much rather be out on his buggy traversing his homestead (as would I).

File Sharing is File Caring

The big task for the weekend was to set up an at-home server system to allow anyone in the office to easily share and store files in a common, safe place. I assumed this would take me all of half-an-hour, maybe a few hours at most, and would be as much wading through menus as it would be trying to find a place for the actual server to live kick-and-stumble-free. In preparation for the weekend, my partner found an absolutely incredible spreadsheet put together by the folks (though I think it might just be folk) at r/MiniPCs, and decided upon buying a Mac Mini with an external SSD to host a local server.

The process wound up being… involved.

File Sharing Across Operating Systems is Not File Caring

As with 72-ish percent of the world, my partner’s dad used several Windows laptops for day-to-day operations, including printing, invoicing, and receiving + editing massive 2+ gig architectural files using programs with black-and-red UIs straight out of 2005. I (mistakenly) assumed sharing files between computers, at least on a local network, would be a breeze: I initially set out to make a server capable of totally remote access, but due to security concerns and only a few day’s worth of prep time, we elected to keep things safe and local.

I personally adore Mac Mini’s, and have spent tons of time writing shell scripts for them, routing OSC between them, and paying the usual creative technologist dues of trying to get them to be the end-all solution for all things computing. Setting up the Mac up was a breeze and took no longer that 15 minutes, with its sensical menu structure and extensive built-in LAN file sharing capabilities.

Setting up the other Windows computers, however, was a Biblical test of patience. First, I needed to investigate SMB, or Server Message Block protocol, so as to access files on a different operating system sharing the same network. I also had to enable file sharing and discoverability, which itself involved all sorts of menu crawling across both Windows 10 and 11, each with uniquely frustrating Control Panel quirks that turned a 2 minute task into a 2 hour one. Not only that, after a good few hours researching whether or not I’d have to ask a man in construction to have to enter code in the Windows Command Line anytime he wanted to review a building plan, I found out I did build a functioning system that was kind-of working, but only on one of the 3 different Windows laptops I was configuring the server for.

Oh Server, Where Art Thou?

Several more hours of YouTube tutorials, in-depth Stack Overflow dives, and inconclusive Windows support threads lead me to my final answer: go the the File Explorer and just type in the name of the Mac Mini.

It worked. After 2 days of headbutting a wall in search for the right Command Line prompt or debating whether the ethernet cables we had were faulty, I learned the only thing between me and success were two backslashes and a word.

All of this to say: I build servers now? So, if you need one, just reach out? I think?

I also have to do this all over again for my own server, which I intend to host on a Raspberry Pi (I finally got a Raspberry Pi!). So, uh, pray for me.

Anyways!

That’s that for the week! Definitely less of a microblog and more of an old-fashioned macroblog (mesoblog?). I keep alluding to work and collaborations that have yet to be released to the public yet, and I swear they will be, and the moment they are you will hear about it here.

Also! My work for Parsons got featured in Fast Company! Look at this nifty screenshot!

As always, be sure to check back here every Friday for my latest ramblings, and enjoy the weekend!

I love CSS.

I’ve found a bit of a niche in being an HTML/CSS layout specialist, and I really enjoy the puzzle-solving nature of figuring out how to implement responsive columns, variable colors, styling for different display languages (I’ll retroactively link this one once its done, it’s currently stuck in domain registrar transfer hell for the next few days). I say this ahead releasing of a few project I’m working on that are pure HTML/CSS/JS, and I’ve personally been loving foregoing frameworks for getting into the nitty-gritty of scripting, formatting, and styling. That being said, there’s a laundry list of frameworks I do need stronger footing in (*cough* React *cough*) but, for fun’s sake, I’m sticking to my very basic .html and .css guns for a bit.

Now: in this week’s microblog (I love this term, and the last one did abnormally well for a listicle and a pseudo-academic blurb) we’ll be talking about how neat CSS is and looking at a few fun examples I’ve been learning from the last few weeks.

Without further ado, CSS!

What isn’t there to say about it? If HTML is the pie dough, CSS is the caramelized filling and the intricate basket weave baked into a brilliant golden brown atop.

It’s often what makes a site really pop, what with an endless catalog of design and formatting options to let developers round their edges and softly fill their linear gradients to their hearts’ content. My first real introduction to web development was in p5.js (my beloved), an incredible JavaScript-based tool that effectively leverages the HTML Canvas to build anything from primitive-based smiley faces to working, if not performant, implementations of Craig Reynolds’ Boids algorithm.

Building things in p5 pretty regularly necessitates only JavaScript, with minimal HTML and, extremely rarely, some CSS formatting for DOM elements.

I mention this because, coming from p5, CSS kinda feels like… cheating? It’s cascading layout is extremely easy to write, pretty intuitive to understand, and is easy to get into the rhythm of when you’re really comfortable hopping between files for small tweaks. It also makes a ton of web interactions an absolute breeze: on-hover (or, if you’re on a phone, on touch) interactions are as easy as adding a single line of code, and it boasts and entire animation and keyframing engine for building anything from rotating logos to a Sisyphean loading screen loop.

I’d even argue CSS alone is a great reason to try your hand at web dev just to get a feel for how fun it can be animating and building interactive elements. I was recently introduced to the term “Microinteractions”, which definitely warrants its own blog, but, to be as reductive as possible: Microinteraction is an entire field related to leveraging things like CSS into subtle, logical quality-of-life improvements, from the faux-tactile feel of a responsive digital button to use cases for animated radial background elements. Truly, something that warrants its own field is well worth looking into!

And that’s that.

That wraps up our second microblog! I recall last week being excited to unveil my latest projects, and rest assured, those announcements are still coming (along with a heaping handful of interactive web experiences and a full game (or, at least, the audio I built for it). Enjoy your microread, and remember to microsubscribe for more microtakes!

I think this will make the third blog in a row where I mention the term microsite, something that’s been popping up all over my Instagram feed and seems to be all-the-rage in the DIY web scene. Mailchimp defines microsites as “a website that promotes a company's products, services, campaigns, events, or entire brand.” This is definitely… technically right, but I want to dive into microsites as art rather than as a means to push product.

As my professional practice turns more and more towards web development, I find myself ever interested in the work of artists like Maya Man and Chia Amisola: the growing appetite for sites-as-art-object marks a really interesting point in digital art I’m about to read a hell of a lot into.

Is it relly a Substack post if it isn’t a soapbox?

Sites-as-art represent a shift away from the absolutely inane if not outright assinine commodification of digital files that came on the precipice of the pandemic. NFTs were symptomatic of a growing sentiment of art as something that needs to have worth, and that it’s best enjoyed flaunted to people who don’t have it or can’t afford it. Art and creative endeavors have, at least since Warhol (who can almost be forgiven since he’s the reason for The Velvet Underground), become symbols that bestow a sort of palpable status to art owners and collectors. Likewise, work often languishes between existing as content or a product in order to survive algorithms rapidly turning to brain rot to maintain dwindling attention spans. This is at no fault to artists: marketing ones work, as well as hinging its worth upon its artificial scarcity (a concept that specifically applies to digital art), is how artists can forge a living from their work.

Microsites, sites-as-poetry, and even web-based music-making tools are a sign of movement towards a much less commidified direction in art and craft: all you need is a browser to view some of the best, most poingiant pieces of the past year — there’s no entry fee, no inherent Web3 sleaze (on the contrary: Web 1, when things were much less refined and more ad hoc, is the vibe), and, really, not much of a barrier to entry. These are pieces that live and breathe among the community their shared with, not meant to be stuck behind glass and viewed from a distance, but to be explored and felt however a site visitor feels most comfortable. The word radical is thrown around a bit much these days, but web arts and microsites are genuinely a radical form of community-oriented expression in which accessibility is just as important as the process. It’s a really beautiful thing to see.

And that’s all I’ve got to say for this week

Originally, I intended to write about how much I love collaboration, but in the spirit of remaining at least a little mysterious and esoteric, I won’t spoil the upcoming collaborative work that’ll be coming out soon. I will spoil that it involves me making music for the first time in forever.

More specifically, I’ve been spending a lot of time figuring out how best to leverage GitHub Pages, an incredible tool for hosting static sites (should you provide all the code). If you’re a dev or have any tangential interest in web stuff, I strongly recommend you look into it: GitHub itself is a great if not lifesaving tool all creatives can benefit from knowing (Hi again, John), but Pages extends repos into functioning sites. As a tangent: the growing practice of microsites and websites-as-art-objects is a perfect use case for something like Pages, where you can throw an index.html, style.css, and script.js into a repo and watch it turn into whatever your heart cooked up.

This isn’t a sponsored post, I swear (if GitHub did, however, want to sponsor a post, they would be more than welcome to).

Anyways! This past week is one I’ve spent digging through how to leverage Page’s barebones approach towards creating editable pages for folks who’d rather not get their hands dirty with HTML or .js. More specifically, I’ve been looking for ways to give folks the tools to write their own video game presskits without much code intervention, taking a ton of inspo from the brilliant presskit() project. Which leads me to today’s topic: XML.

Web Xcellence

To preface: XML is sick. For non-dev folks, XML is like if HTML were in sandbox mode: none of your <tags> really hold any special value except for what you assign them in the sites (or apps, if you’re annoying) they live in. You can do things like nest little bits of information inside one another in a way that makes sense specifically to you, then leverage Javascript to populate your website with the info you’ve entered. For instance, if you want a convenient place to put a list of your favorite foods on your site, you can make a new document called aboutMe.xml and enter:

Neat, right?

And, for the sake of argument, lets say you have a little blank web page and some boilerplate HTML that looks something like this, were you want to list your favorite foods:

Cute! Simple! Dare I say: fun! But what if you wanted a little bullet point list under your <h1> element, and you wanted to grab some data out of your XML document to populate the list? To do that, you’d use something like this:

Not cute! Not simple! And most certainly: not fun! .js ruins the day yet again!

Actually, though, if you sit with it for a bit, it starts making sense: we find the XML document, make a new XML parser, find the xml tags we’re looking for, find the HTML element (in our case, an unorganized list, or <ul>) we want to put our list into, count the number of <food> items we have and feed it into a for() loop, iterate through every element labelled <food> and get their respective text info, create a new list item, populate that list item with the text inside the <food> item we’ve found, and add that new list element to the existing <ul> in HTML (phew). It… works.

The fun thing about this script: you can keep adding to your list of your favorite food, and it’ll keep populating the list on the HTML side! This is (kinda) a good stepping stone for getting into AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the technique Wordpress uses to update things like comments and tickers in real-time. Be forewarned, AJAX is a hell of a rabbit hole to jump in to, but it’s absolutely worth it if you’re a dev.

What did we learn today, class?

I didn’t expect this week’s blog to be a psuedo-tutorial and intro to XML + parsing, but here at software sprouts by Dayflower Studio, we believe in the beauty of generative, iterative processes (read: me having a general vibe for a post, entering a writer’s trance, and emerging 40 minutes later with an article I barely remember writing, as if possessed by a ghost with a penchant for parentheses).

So! I (personally, as Jay) have all sorts of things cooking on my end, and will likely be writing about them soon as they emerge and enter the public space. Until then, thanks for reading, and see you next week!

So!

In the year-or-so since my last meaningful post, I’ve developed a whole slew of skills that warranted a full overhaul of my online portfolios and web presence. Dayflower went from vague graphic design, a smattering of motion graphics, and a lucky few audio projects to a fully-featured web design and development firm. It’s been a hell of a ride, and I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel at least a little pride in the fact I can look back to a year ago and laugh at how little I knew about the things I now do on a daily basis. Wordpress? The thing I built a site on to host some deep cuts I made in undergrad? I’ve spent somewhere around 200 hours crawling through its documentation trying to figure out how the hell to get the The Loop to work and best practices for building themes (read: figuring out what will or won’t break my site if I add it to functions.php).

Often, I find I look back on my older projects *cough* polyMorph *cough* and think it would’ve been really, really neat if I weren’t so hardheaded and gave learning web dev a shot years ago. I’ve been doing my best to make up for lost time between client projects, cultivating a bit of a weird web audio gadget practice on my newly-renovated personal website. Cycling 74’s rnbo~ offered an absolutely incredible jumping-off point into the world of the web, something I more-or-less entirely wrote off as beyond my scope of interest, and gave me a channel into learning the basics of HTML and JavaScript building my usual buffet of audio oddities. About two years later, now deep into my web dev practice, I remembered I had a rnbo~ license and jumped into the deep end. I’m still diving, figuring out how to best integrate audio into React apps and build real-time responsive audio engines (this is all a part of my very big, very (currently) early-stage passion project I intend to spend the next year with. More on that when I’m further along).

What a wonderful web

This brings me to the actual point of this blog: I love the web. It’s capacity for building and fostering community, as well as its unparalleled collection of the truly innovative and weird, make it one of the best tools anyone who’s creative can have in their toolbox. Web poetry calling into question the materiality of the medium, data sonification of Wikipedia, extensive archives rivaling the Library of Congress specializing in esoteric art, art collectives redefining the concept of live streaming and community interaction — the web literally has it all. I’ve been absolutely obsessed with the idea that the web exists as something you can access on a little device that lives in your pocket, that its something you can scroll on a bite-sized screen (whether that scrolling entails doom, who knows) wherever you’ve got signal. Wireless communication and data sharing is such a wild concept — easily capable of incapacitating a Victorian child — and even though the web is, what — 30+ years old now? — its capacity for hosting easily distributable creativity continues to grow exponentially.

As someone who’s spent the last 10 years working with some rather undistributable tech (I love you, Max, but you know it’s true), audio on the web opens up some, if not almost all, doors for sharing my work with folks. I’ve been doing it recently, and I love it: so much so, in fact, my entire creative practice shifted towards leveraging the possibilities of mobile-first websites as a means to share my usual wonky audio goodies. All of this to say: watch this space for more updates on neat little sound devices; while they might not be in Max for Live these days, they’re still coming!

From the toybox: a checkbox keyboard

In the spirit of my first blog posts, we’ll be taking a look at the first instrument(?) I built and featured on my personal site: my toy sequencer. In the spirit of making something obnoxious but still, at least, the slightest bit fun, I had the bright idea to make a synthesizer controlled by checkboxes (strongly inspired by the fun I saw happening over at 1 Million Checkboxes). It’s a piano scroll, but with standard, unformatted HTML checkboxes painstakingly organized to look like a normal piano scroll regardless of screen size (this was by far the most difficult part of putting this together). The audio guts are written in rnbo~, and look a little something like this:

For Max nerds: there’s absolutely a better, more organized, less banging-your-head-again-a-keyboard method to doing this, but just as a proof-of-concept, I did, in fact, manually make 12 different ossilators accepting 12 different on/off switches with individual names. If you want something really awful to look at, take a peek at this JavaScript:

Can I optimize this? Yes. Should I optimize this? Absolutely. Will I optimize this?

No.

Anyways: I built this neat doohickey that’s a play off my first experiments with web development and rnbo~ deployment. It lives on my nice, flashy personal site, now proudly featuring a background running Hydra.

Toodles!

That’s it for this week! I’ll be making this a regular thing at about 8:30 AM every Friday, so keep your eyes on your inbox for the latest from Dayflower!

Down to business: TikTok is horrifying

This past weekend I went home for Fathers Day, notably after stumbling upon free soup dumplings at Shanghai You Garden in Flushing (when I tell you I had a transcendent experience eating their scallion pancakes, I am not exaggerating). My dad — in talking to my partner about keeping relevant these days and the general concept of influencers — wandered onto the topic of TikTok. My partner, the angel that she is, offered to screencast her For You Page onto the living room TV to give him a general sense of what TikTok is all about.

I’ve long felt like there’s something especially off about TikTok, but 1) seeing it take up an entire TV and 2) being hyper-vigilant of the usual fodder my partner often shows me between her meetings, I couldn’t shake a distinct feeling of terror. Now in the shoes of a 60-something year-old, I was being truly pummeled by wave after wave of Miguel O’Hara fancams and cats wearing AR sombreros set to ranchera, helplessly clinging to my seat as the feed endlessly refreshed and iterated over itself. There were countless Shih Tzus (if you know my partner, you know), endless home videos of quebredita rapida dance routines(once again, if you know my partner, you know), and a few videos with that one audio about margaritas, which we very deftly scrolled past.

I was overwhelmed. I found myself sharing a father-son bonding moment a la Clockwork Orange, eyes collectively glued to swaths of curated content. Seconds turned to hours, days, years — I was an onlooker in an algorithmically perfected dance choreographed to my partner’s score; I was complicit in exposing my own father to the unbridled torrent of information that comes with endless feeds. Within a minute or two, I couldn’t tell, it ended.

The typical pace of life resumed. I remained in awe, struck with a distinctly new feeling: I’d somehow psyop’d myself into a new perspective, with social media as a horrifying and all-consuming stampede of kids doing dumb things and references I could never hope to understand. Did I suddenly connect the dots to old, white reactionism? Had I cracked a code to understanding the conservative tendency to cling to things as they are, to see the perpetual shifts of culture as a threat to life itself; a drive to marry the respect for what was with the excitement and dread of what’s to come?

@i.am.maddoxcrazy? i was crazy once. they locked me in a room. a rubber room, a rubber room with rats. and rats make me crazy. crazy? #insanity #deranged #smii7y #smii7yclips #crazy #fyp #strandeddeep

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No.

But I did realize that, sometimes, things that are new can be scary. And that’s okay! Newness is a sort of unquantifiable, uncontainable force-of-nature, occasionally blessing human efforts with a chrome-y sheen exclusive to things that approach things differently. Someone somewhere surely has a better definition and understanding of newness, and would do a great job explaining its ineffable nature. They’d probably also mention something about how newness is often a currency in the world of art, and how those who make strive to make things that redefine or innovate. Something about the false notion of progress only existing as a means for profit, a poignant critique of late-stage capitalism, maybe a manifesto on the act of making as a foundational act of love.

I don’t know. I just make my little devices, like this one:

The fun part: live.wander!

We’re past the walls of text, thank God! Now, we can talk about things like audio delays and randomized parameters and all the good stuff, which I’m sure sounds extraordinarily interesting to people who aren’t specifically me.

live.wander is a 4-tap delay effect — in normal people terms, it’s an echo effect that contains 4 distinct echo chambers. The goofy part about live.wander is that these echo chambers all feed into one another, meaning that they can hypothetically (and often do) iterate over themselves endlessly to create absolutely massive, warping textures.

live.wander was made as a delay effect to (kinda) end all delay effects. It takes the concept of audio delaying to the extreme by turning it into an instrument in-and-of-itself, able to take any input signal and massage it into any sort of warbling wall of sound its generative heart desires. It works largely based on controlled randomness, allowing users to have a bit of control over how the delay will sound, but not much. live.wander really does wander, meandering along its own path. If you’re a fan of letting go and letting God, live.wander might be something that interests you.

The new part: a cool thing from this week!

I have been informed that recaps, collections, curated lists, etc. are the secret sauce to getting a Substack to thrive. The space below is devoted to something that I found neat from the past week, be it software, music, design, or truly whatever struck my fancy:

This Max for Live developer, who goes by fendoap, made a functioning version of Tetris in Max. I’m gonna make the assumption they did so with JSUI, the big, scary (to me, personally) built-in version of Javascript-esque rendering and interaction that more-or-less lets programmers run wild with anything they can dream of. I adore playful interfaces, and given that this one is an entire game, I’m smitten. Give them a follow!

Also: I found myself recommending this album to someone this week. If you haven’t yet, do yourself a favor and give it a listen. I don’t often recommend music, but this one means so, so much more to me than just being a great album. All these years after discovering it, this remains one of my favorite all-time songs:

You might recognize the voice at about the halfway point in this track, especially if you happened to grow up in the 90s and aughts.

The end part: see you in a week!

So, yeah. First post since rebranding! A return to the platform! A return to form? Who knows! Stick around for all the latest on what Dayflower is up to, and enjoy the solstice!

And while you’re here, be a mensch and follow me on Instagram and Twitter! And, for extra credit, maybe even follow my personal Insta!

Remember last week when I said I actively avoid math that requires even the slightest hint of wrinkling in the brain? I lied!

Turns out last week didn’t involve enough numerical suffering for me and, in fact, seems to have set in motion a new desire to actually learn how to math. A wild sentiment, and one that hopefully becomes a recurring theme in my who-knows-where-we-end adventures in audio development.

There was going to be a very fun, very interesting, certainly very different announcement that went along with the release of this next device, but I’ve been absolutely swamped by work as of late. The announcement is hereby postponed for the foreseeable future (at least a few weeks), but I’ll give you a hint as to what it entails.

So! The preamble is certainly gonna be quite a bit shorter this week, something I’m chalking up to a fleeting sense of wanting to show you folks that I do actually know some digital signal processing techniques. Such thinking falls into everyone’s favorite thought trap of self-doubt and feeds into a perpetual downward spiral of overall confidence, so go ahead and forget you read the italicized part of the last sentence. This is a feel-good blog, and if we’re doing anything short of getting a few muted snorts or slightly up-tilted, once-sided grins, we’re all going to hell.

Math, again

This is where I would put a gif (the g is soft, as in “good”) of a sign that reads “applause” lighting up. I know at least one of you does math for a living (this is a callout: Hi John!) and has likely come across the following concept conveyed with more verve sometime in their undergraduate past. This week, we’re working with euclidian rhythm!

Here’s the gist, which coincidentally is about all I’m able to confidently explain: you, dear reader and reluctant passenger in thiis trainwreck, want to generate a sequence of ons and offs, 1s and 0s, yes’ and no’s, as it goes. There are 2 typical variables that go into a list of 1s and 0s, and an additional twist that euclidian rhythms are particularly beloved for. A euclidian rhythm takes, for input, the length of the list, the number of 1s (and therefore 0s) in the list, and its rotation. A formula magically allocates the triggers as evenly as mathematically possible, resulting in all sorts of odd asymmetrical mayhem. Rotation determines the offset of the resulting list, with the general idea being that the list wraps around on itself and technically has no set beginning or end. The vibe here is that this sequence is, at its heart, a circle. For a comprehensible explanation, watch this video from this nice young man:

Alrighty, great, we can now, after a deep exhale and remembering to breathe, move on to the fun part:

live.alligater

This week’s device, live.alligater (not a typo, unlike most of this post), is a rhythmic gating effect. It takes an input signal and maps a sequence to the output volume of said input signal. The end result is something that minces absolutely anything into tangentially rhythmic bursts, with the amplitude directly correlating to the ons and offs of a euclidian rhythm of your choosing.

The device likewise comes with a rather large randomize button, and all parameters can be toggled on or off for value randomization simply by clicking on them. The color scheme on this one is reflective of the announcement that was to come this week, and is one that will likely be making a return in the future. A fun little tidbit: live.alligater is more-or-less a port of an experimental effect built for polyMorph, and it certainly won’t be the last. Though the next will likely be an instrument (here’s another cryptic hint for you).

Wrap-up!

As always, stay tuned for whatever comes next and, and I’m endlessly grateful to all of you readers and users out there making this little project into, for me, a little something more than just a hobby!

This week’s device is something I’ve been thinking about making for months, but never actually got around to properly implementing. I’m an absolute sucker for fuzzy, amp-breaking distortion — the more unrecognizable the input signal, the better. I can talk at-length about how fuzz pedals on guitars give me life, but to spare you an exceedingly common opinion among suburban white kids raised on Green Day, My Chemical Romance, and Linkin Park, I’ll instead do something (hopefully) a bit more productive: try to broach my creative process for the last week.

I know I mentioned this a bit last week, but I’m absolutely floored by the reception my tiny little freeware devices are getting. Like absolutely blown away that friends and strangers alike are getting use out of some projects I’ve been using to come out of my creative shell. To say thank you isn’t enough, and I’m sure to continue saying thank you both in writing here and, honestly, every single time I see a download over on Gumroad, but nonetheless: Thank you all so, so much.

So! This last week was one of the lighter ones so-far, in terms of ideation and execution. I’ve known for a bit I wanted to make something warm and, specifically, to name it Heat, but the ongoingness of this new freeware gig finally made me put pen to paper (cursor to page? .maxpat into Documents folder? God I love cliches). I came across something I’d been living in fear of since starting this series, though, and I’d be amiss not to make a mention of it and the headaches it wrought: math.

Math: eater of worlds, bane of high schoolers

I love programming. I love digital signal processing, clattering keys scrambling to declare functions, afternoons hunched over a laptop like Smeagol learning Processing. I am horrified of math. Music programming is, of course, literally all math, which makes my fear of it even more entertaining (from a once-removed sort of view, not a “how do I translate this function for an exponential curve into C” kinda way). I’ve done a rather excellent job avoiding meaningful math for what must be 10 years now, an achievement alone, but live.heat (this week’s new device) threw me back into my pre-algebra days of desperately hoping I could remember when to use cosine versus tangent.

live.heat works on a remarkably simple principle that requires 1. an general background in knowing what you’re doing, or 2. a commitment to brute-forcing until you never want to touch a computer again. The actual distortion part of live.heat takes an input signal and limits its maximum amplitude, essentially acting as a particularly harsh waveshaper. Messing with amplitude often means having to compensate for lost volume, something easily doable, in this case, with a proper exponential curve. If you’re me, however, no amount of internet resources or friendly Stack Overflow exchanges can get through your 10+ years of dense, algebra resistant skull.

The one thing I did remember from high school algebra was something about slopes, particularly the wonderful concept that y does, in fact, equal mx + b. So instead of writing out a single highly elegant, grown-up line of rudimentary math, I instead wrote an if/else statement with 3 far less elegant examples of rudimentary math. In essence: instead of writing code to draw a nice big curve, I wrote code that drew 3 different lines that kinda look like a nice big curve from across the room. The line (or lines, in my case) is used to compensate for lost signal loudness by upping the gain appropriately.

But anyways, why prattle on about math when we should instead be talking about:

live.heat

live.heat is a Max for Live distortion effect that mimics old-school fuzz pedals from the likes of Vox. Realizing this means very little to most people, it sounds like this:

And also bit like the first few seconds of this:

All of that to say: it takes input audio an crushes it into a warm, screaming, overdriven wall of sound. It’s simple, has only 2 knobs, and is made to turn even the cleanest inputs into the nastiest bundles of scratchy fuzz your speakers can handle.

Head to my Gumroad, give it a download, and slap it on the end of a signal chain!

That’s all, folks!

For this week, that is. Naturally, I’ll be back in a week to share the next device with you, along with a whole lot of words that are only tangentially related to said device. See you then!

Week 3 of the newsletter! This is about as far as I assumed this little creative exercise would go, but truth be told, I’m absolutely loving the weekly deliverable-by-deadline structure this had added to my life. I’ve often (literally always) avoided self-imposed deadlines in the past, even knowing that due-by dates are the only way I’ve ever been able to hold myself accountable for getting things done.

A designer on designing

This past week was, regarding the development of my weekly M4L patch, a tough one: Max, and really programming in general, trades trudging through low-level code for optimized performance, better efficiency, and overall a higher degree of creative agency. There are some absolute marvels of audio programming prowess that really, really don’t feel like they’re made in Max (treading on thin ice here, buying into the whole “this feels like it was made with [software]’s default assets and is therefore lazy and uncreative" paradigm, but it’s a constant spectre over my own work). Nearly all of these projects come with a litany of bespoke UI and brilliant, novel approaches to getting sound out of your laptop. Just look at this:

Mine don’t. It takes a lot out of me to even come up with a meaningful color pallette for my devices, let alone figure out what the mandatory Gumroad screenshots should look like. For someone who went to design school, I can’t stand actually designing how my little machines should look, how the sliders should behave, how visuals correlate to timbral outputs. Maybe this is why I love generative music so much: you can obsess over the tiny details as much as you want, but the final product always embodies a sort of “let go and let God” approach (God usually being a neat little algorithm or box of chance-based operations).

Anyways! Part of this whole creative exercise in letting go and letting God involves me challenging my own notions of quality and individuality and instead emphasizes getting products and code out the door. I don’t derive a particularly meaningful amount of meaning from making neat little UIs, but I find a massive amount of fulfllment in actually getting my gadgets into the hands of folks like you.

So, onto the good part!

live.floop

live.floop is a looper, audio mangler, glitch machine, wavetable synth, and all-around multitool for getting pre-recorded samples to sound very much so not like themselves. It’s inspired by flop, an incredible sample playback device included in the beloved Max package ppooll, where I spend a good deal of time troubleshooting tech issues over on its respective Discord server.

live.floop takes two distinct playback engines and uses a sort of digital tape-loop approach to make the most out of very few controls. You can play files in reverse, use external automation to relish in some bizarre file-readback artifacts, and even use it as a MIDI synthesizer (albiet with a very specific implementation, made specifically to reward exploration!). For extra tidbits on how to use it, you can tap the logo in the devices bottom-right corner to pull up a tiny help window detailing the general vibe. Give it a try and leave a review on the Gumroad if you like it!

So, what else?

On a more personal note: live.floop is the most algorithmically demanding device I’ve made so-far, and is 1. liable to breaking, and 2. a functioning prototype of a tape-loop-esque sample player I’ve been working on for a long, long time. I can’t imagine any other per-week devices coming close to the functionality of this specific device, and for that reason, I’ll probably be updating live.floop periodically to perfect it, if not re-releasing it when I’ve settled on a more robust algorithm. Of all the devices I’ve released so far, this one is by far the most personally and creatively daunting, and likewise the most fulfilling to see released. As always, send things you make with it my way, I truly live to hear what sort of things folks do with my little gadgets!

I’ve been struggling with the concept of artistic worth for a long while, probably nearing 10 years of being convinced what I made wasn’t good enough to be put out into the world. Attaching worth to things is, almost always, a disaster waiting to happen: evaluating art by the same materialistic logic applied to goods and services is a really excellent way to guarantee 1. you get into internet fights with weirdos in places like the Pitchfork Instagram comment section and 2. you start finding nothing is ever worth your time. I could go into a massive tangent about consumerism and the commodification of art, but instead, I’m just gonna say that maybe you shouldn’t evaluate your own creative projects based on arbitrarily harmful notions of worth. If you find yourself in the rut of already doing so, consider, instead, not. Escape your mind-prison, and all of that (I’m being flippant about this because this is an arduous if not absolutely excrutiating process, and being obnoxious is my coping mechanism).

Anyways: as I’ve mentioned via Instagram and the About page for this blog, I’m using this as a little experiment, a tiny foray into my own brand of exposure therapy. The goal of this blog is to reconcile my fear of imperfection with my desire to try to tangibly change the world (awful cliche, but stay with me), or at least to finally get some Max patches out of the backlog in my Documents folder. About every week or so, I’ll be posting a little blurb here about attempting to overcome some deep-seated artistic insecurity, along with a Max patch or Ableton device for you, dear reader, to play around with.

I’ll say one last thing before I start talking about the music-making gizmo: if you use them, for the love of God PLEASE send me recordings, audio files, anything! I would LOVE to hear these things in action, and being able to listen to how folks use the little doodads I put together always has and always will give me life!

So without any further ado:

live.slush

Who doesn’t love some good slush? I know I do!

live.slush is an audio effect made for mangling. The short of it: run any sound into live.slush and the output will sound like anything from a steadily chugging train to a cacophony of rainsticks. This little guy is great for goofy, generative rhythms, and is equally at home adding a bit of burbly je ne sais quoi to guitars and vocals.

The long of it: live.slush takes real-time input, writes it into a very tiny buffer, and uses 2D-interpolation to generate some really bizarre textures. More specifically, it uses 10 2D interpolators to thicken the mix, with the four interactable dials controlling interpolation rate and offset between the 10 buffer readers. There’s a reseed button in there to immediately generate new values for all 4 dials, ideal for exploring what live.slush is capable of.

And that’s that!

At least for this week. Next week I’ll likely have plenty more vague observations about art and self-worth. I fully intended to say something poignant about how, even in the single week since I’ve started this blog, I’ve felt infinitely more creative and driven to make devices to share with folks. The idea that it really is up to me to define what I’m comfortable putting out into the world feels, at least to me, like a radical one born equally from reckless confidence, careful reevaluation of beliefs, and a permeating frustration/exhaustion (a common thread, I’ve noticed, since the pandemic). Were I more poetic, I’m sure I could fill a stanza or two right about here with some thoughts about my own journey of radical acceptance being a form of self-care and growth. But anyways: After 10 years of being entirely unable to make any new music or release any material (sans polyMorph, which was technically a school project), I think I’ve found a neat little groove I can comfortably nestle myself into.

In the meantime, enjoy live.slush and send me tracks you use it in!

Subscribe now

So

I never imagined, under any circumstances, that I’d start a Substack (substack? SubStack??), but since MailChimp is genuinely unusable, here we are. Apologies in advance for the extra text, this newsletter thingy exists exclusively to share new things you can download and maybe some ice-cold takes on music stuff.

The gist

These emails will almost invariably just be a link to my Gumroad with some flavor text. I read a really wonderful piece offering a bit of advice for game devs — specifically, about creating smaller-scale, intensely personal games without paying much mind to manufacturing the next masterpiece. I’ve always struggled with putting things out into the world (God knows how many unfinished tracks and half-functional programs are laying dormant in laptops of old) but, taking this sort of “make for yourself and just put things out there” mentality to heart, I’m gonna give this whole developer thing a try.

The goods

Check out live.cltl if you’re an Ableton nut or a Max-er: it’s a wonderfully robust drum machine and drone synth made to be just esoteric enough to sweat the small stuff for you.

More technically: it’s a noise algorithm that reacts to MIDI input with 6 voices and 4 parameters. It’s small, light, and fun to noodle around with for some classic digital glitch.

The rest

That’s really it. I’ll be putting out more small-ish concept patches and software as time passes, so keep your eyes open for any new posts!