Underwaterbob

Holy heck what a slog. It's 90% incomprehensible 1940s pop culture references, nonsense poetry, and word salad. Then, BLAM, the rest is brilliantly hilarious and fantastically written. (Extremely graphic depiction of coprophilia aside.)

It seems like every time I'm about to put the book down for good, Pynchon throws me a bone and massively entertains. I'm 40% of the way through, and I've almost given up a half dozen times. I am at least starting to maybe glean a little bit of the plot out of the jumble. A little bit. I really hope it becomes a little more clear at some point because it's a little discouraging.

Has anyone here made it through? Worth it? Did you understand what was going on?

What a book!

I've finished all the games more than once on various hardware, but the collection only became playable on Steam Deck relatively recently. They're so much better there!

Any lovers of Metroidvanias or platformers in general owe it to themselves to check it out. Since they were originally GBA games, they scale to the Steam Deck's screen very well and don't hurt my old-man's eyes at all.

Great experience! Can't wait to check out the Dominus collection when I'm done with these. I've played through those a few times on OG hardware as well. I bet they're so much better on Deck! I really hope they've removed the awful touch screen boss capture mechanic in Dawn of Sorrow. I imagine they must have given these are playable on PC, and doing them with a mouse would be just short of impossible.

Anyone else see this thing? Personally, I think TE is out of their mind if they think it's worth $2300. I see the sentiment being repeated a lot.

The disappointing part is, you know it'll sell like crazy, anyway. Screw them for this ridiculous price gouging. Screw people for supporting their price gouging. I'm not usually a vindictive person, but I hope sales are awful so they don't inspire anyone else to try this approach.

Seriously, anyone considering this thing, go buy a Digitakt or an Oxi One and use it with your phone and take a nice trip to Thailand or something with your leftover money.

All the synthtubers are gushing. I'd gush too if TE forwarded me one early for free.

My latest Oxi One - Beetlecrab Audio Tempera - Erica Synths/Sonic Potions LXR-02 jam. I'm not usually one to jam and instead plan stuff out pretty meticulously, but this set up is just so fun to mess around with.

Did anyone else see this? It's in pretty early development, but exciting! I'd love to see the Steam Deck become a M8 competitor. Not because I think Valve needs any more money, but because a M8 is so hard to buy and this would be a decent placeholder.

Or more! It's obviously got a lot more processing power than a M8. Hopefully it gets some decent synth emulations (Mutable's open source ones?) Analog sticks open up some interesting performance options, too.

The biggest drawback would be the need for some kind of external interface if you wanted to use it as a sequencer. M8's got it beat there. Mechanical keys are also nicer than the SD's buttons.

I have been using my tempera relentlessly. I have in fact started finally populating my YouTube channel almost exclusively with tempera videos. I do still have Doctor Doctor lying around. Haha!

I'm the sole mod of our (I use the term loosely) synthesizer community. There's so little engagement, why not just spam it?

I'm waiting for a refund I told myself I'd wait for before buying an Oxi One. I paid for a car repair last year, and it turned out the part was faulty on all those vehicles, so they're giving me my money back. It wasn't a cheap repair, either. It will almost cover the cost of an Oxi One entirely. The refund should be here any day, now.

I've watched the number of Oxi One's on their website drop from undefined, to 8 left in stock, to 2 left in stock. Needless to say, it's a bit of a nail biter. Will my bank's sloth prevent my purchase and save me a bunch of money I'll probably just blow on something else? Who can tell? 4 of 3-to-5 business days have passed. I'm literally shaking. Haha!

I don't actually need the refund. I have the money now, anyway. It's more fun this way!

I've all but blown my tax refund on an Oxi One at this point, but I though I'd ask (if there's anyone around..) I've looked at the major contenders, and I'm pretty sure the One is the one for me. Korg SQ64 and Arturia Beatstep/Keystep Pro seem a bit too simplistic for my purposes, Hapax a little too expensive, and Cirklon, well, I'm not waiting 4 years or spending that much.

The only thing the One has against it is that I'm not really a modular guy, and it has a lot of modular functionality. The Hapax is probably a better choice since I work mainly with MIDI, BUT, I also don't have much space left and the battery powered, smaller One really appeals. I also don't really have that big of a set up, so the four sequencers of the One are definitely enough. Especially since I shall mostly be using it with a DAW and if I really need more sequencing power, it's there. The Hapax is likely quite overpowered for my purposes.

Am I missing any obvious choices? I saw a fairly cheap Toraiz Squid, but I'm not sure about that one at all.

I ordered one some time back, and it showed up two-and-a-half weeks ago. I've been making patches almost daily. Well, to be fair, I generated a fair number of samples before I even got it. Some of them worked out, others did not. I've been on the Discord with the creators, and they actually implemented a couple of firmware changes I suggested. Damn! It's an amazing creative tool with a great community behind it.

I'd write a full review, but that would take time away from continuing to use it. So much potential, so many ideas. I can't wait to absolutely slather my next album in it.

You can see some examples on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3hZED_SAmcAeUGli_1Elew

So, my work machine was getting long in the tooth. Occasionally not booting and requiring me to jiggle memory sticks or tighten CPU cooler screws. It was a DDR3 machine with a Xeon E3 1230V2 with 8gb of RAM (and oddly enough an RTX 2060.) The fans were getting pretty loud, too.

I had a Ryzen 2600x and 16gb of DD4 from my home PC lying around, so I bought a cheap mainboard, tore the old one out of the case, attached all the hardware to the new mainboard - including the SSD with Mint installed - and BOOM! It booted first try without issue. Even going from Intel to AMD, DDR3 to DDR4. My mind is blown!

I can't imagine how borked my machine would have been if I'd tried that with Windows.

Now, what do I do with a still-working Xeon and mainboard?!?

Peter Watts' Blindsight should be no stranger to anyone on PrintSF. On our Reddit incarnation, it was recommended in just about every thread asking for recommendations. It was sometimes even a suitable recommendation.

Echopraxia is its much-less-well-known sequel, and it's the Art Garfunkel to Blindsight's Paul Simon. It's definitely not as well thought out or comprehensible, but it still does its own thing pretty well, and is a great complement to the other. Though, it might not quite stand on its own so well.

Watts has changed the setting from near space to, well, nevermind, we're back in space. There are some bits early on that are on Earth, and I thought those were quite promising. There's some great world building - and it really is a fascinating near-future Earth that he's thought up - but, well, a chapter in and we're thrust back into space aboard another spaceship with a whacky crew of post-human misfits.

Which is fine. Blindsight proved he's quite adept at writing that sort of thing. Only, this time around, no one is quite as, uhh, anti-charismatic as the protagonist of that. The main character is as unlikable as Siri Keeton in his own way, but he's not the fascinating character study. He's just a guy past his prime trying to not get killed in a world he doesn't understand very well anymore.

And not getting killed isn't a minor accomplishment in this book. Without getting too spoilery, don't get attached to anyone too much. Not that that's much of an accomplishment, either. The marine who practices combat maneuvers in his sleep, and the vendetta obsessed pilot aren't exactly begging you to be on their side. Neither are the mute hive mind scientists or their interpreter. The latter of whom might actually be the only sympathetic character in the entire book. Hey, I might have felt a twinge of sympathy for the resurrected vampire.

Bashing aside, I enjoyed this book a lot. Much like in Blindsight, Watts loves to throw mind-melting ideas about melting-minds at the pages and seeing what sticks. Quite a few of them did this time around, though not as often as in that one. Some of the mind-melting ideas about melting-minds came across as half-baked or just not particularly well described. For example, the titular Echopraxia only shows up in the last twenty pages or so, and I don't think we're ever told exactly how it came about. Though it's entirely possible I missed it.

On missing things, I must admit, I either missed or plain did not understand a lot of the plot points of this one. Daniel Bruks (the MC I mentioned) finds himself in ludicrous situation after ludicrous situation which are far too coincidental to be coincidental. There are many allusions to things not being quite as they seem, but very few actual revelations of reality. The end of the book in particular seemed very vague to me, though I suspect a lot of what's happening could be inferred by tying it together with Blindsight to make some sort of meta-narrative on the nature of consciousness and its necessity or lack thereof. And yeah, I've lost myself now.

Watts' books typically demand a re-read or two.

Which I'm sure I'll get around to right after I read something mindless and action driven. I need a break.

4/5 holes punched in my consciousness