Some Consumerism

August 29, 2021

I bitch about consumerism a lot, yet, I like things. So that’s what this post is about. Things. Things I’ve bought over the last few years and what things fall into “OhMyGod This is Life Changing”, “A Bit of a Mixed Bag” and “How Did You Fuck This Up?”. Because I know not everyone cares about all these products, I’m going to skip right to the juicy bit- the thinking about what lessons come from this thinking:

Conclusions #

• It’s easy to mess up something good by trying to hard to appease people or meet an expectations. Symptoms of this may appear as one dimensional characters, feature creep, or trying to obscure deeper settings
• Conversely, not providing a heavily requested feature can be just as bad
• One major issue can make something otherwise great unbearable
• Don’t underestimate the little things, like a good pair of underwear or red light bulb
• Sometimes, no matter how much research you do before hand, things will just suck once you try them hands on
• Not everything is on a spec sheet - “Just Works” is often worth a lot more than we think.
• It’s okay to put down a book or TV show part way though. If it sucks, there are better ways to spend your time.
• Making something feel honest and real matters
• If you assume your users/viewers are intelligent regardless of age or class and that they will pick up on even subtle comments on society, it is a lot better than not making those comments at all or trying to explain them after the fact
• Don’t make people guess how to use something. If it’s not obvious, either tell them right away or find a way to detect they may be lost.
• Get different demographics to check what you make. If it’s writing, have someone of another gender and someone of a different culture read it, if it’s a user interface, make sure it’s accessible, etc. This will make the experiance for everyone better, as often even users not directly impacted will notice others would be: Think about seeing a multi-story building with no elevator - most people immediately consider how that will be an issue for those with limited mobility. see r/menwritingwomen
• Even if you already have something that serves a purpose, sometimes getting something that has a better interface or is dedicated to the task is worth it - like getting guitar pedals instead of using just digital effects.
• If given the choice between a $30 indie game made in a week that you’ll actually play and a $60 AAA game with a multi-million dollar budget that’s popular, the game you’ll actually play is still the better value - that is, think about what you want, not what everyone else is getting.
• People will judge your product’s quality based on how much they paid for it. If something is cheap and bad, that’s a lot less of a problem than if it’s expensive and bad.

OhMyGod This is Life Changing #

Music Hardware #

1. The Launchpad Pro Mk3.

   I had a Launchpad Mk2 before this, and while it was fine it wasn’t even really something I’d recommend. Meanwhile, the LP Pro Mk3, with velocity sensative pads and after touch is almost the only controller I need. It doesn’t have a way to hook up a sustain pedal, and the lack of pitch and mod wheels means It can’t take over synth control duties entirely, but in general it made playing music a lot more fun - espically with scale mode turned on since I’m ass at music theory

2. 7-String, nice guitar

   I’ve been playing on cheap guitars for a long time. Not like bottom of the barrel cheap, but cheap. This guitar was… to much money. Yet, every time I play it I’m in love. The 7th string is just way to much fun

3. EHX PitchFork+

   This pedal is more fun than it has any right to be

4. Elektron Digitakt

   It’s sold as a drum machine, but paired with a midi controller to sequence notes (and ideally a standalone synth as to not sacrifice some of the sample chanels) it’s really a full on make-music-in-a-box system.

5. DT-770 Pro Headphones

   I spent way to long researching headphones, and finally settled on these. They sound great, they’re comfortable, and they make me hate my lower quality MP3s- a very good sign of quality.

Electronics #

1. Ender3 3D Printer

   3D printers are a massive PITA. Until you get things set right a lot of your prints will fail. Yet, this printer, for the cost, is astounding. When my prints don’t end in spagetti (mostly from poor bed adhesion) the quality is really good and I can’t help but smile at the sight of a finished print

2. CO2 Meter

   Having this meter has helped me notice multiple times as my room has started to get stuffy - greater than 1700ppm seems to be when I can actually notice - and just opening the door or getting some airflow going when that happens has helped me feel better. Is it a placebo? Maybe.

3. A Red Light Bulb

   I put a red light bulb in the lamp next to my bed. If I just need enough light to get up real quick or to rearrange blankets the color and low brightness don’t really wake me up, just let me see

4. BDN9 Macropad

   This has made making art in Krita much more comfortable. Encoders on keyboards need to be more common!

5. Lab Equipment

   1. DataVac - No more using, and running out of, canned air!
   2. Autoranging, decent multi-meter - Fast componet identification, just nicer to use
   3. Rigol DS1054Z - Ha4kz to unlock features, 10000x nicer than the $20 Arduino scopes
   4. DSLogic Logic Analyzer - I don’t even use it that much, but it’s so much nicer than those dirt cheap 8 channel Salae clones or the slightly more expensive 16 channel clones.

6. Steam Controller

   The only controller that felt native to PC and made me want to play some games with a controller

Life Stuff #

1. Oculus Quest 2

   Literally purchased almost exclusively for Beat Saber. Such an incredible step up from the OSVR HDK2 I had before. I did find it absolutely necessary to replace the face plate and strap, as well as add controller grips. This adds to the cost, but the content available does get me moving. PC connectivity to play Risk Of Rain 2 with a VR mod is pretty sweet too. Facebook being shoved down my throat still makes me unhappy though. - Note, because Facebook can go eat a dick, I’m still refusing to link to this.

2. Chill Games

   There’s a tiny, tiny part of me that feels weird about liking games that aren’t normally talked about or AAA. Yet, Mini Motorways, Snakey Bus, Ultimate Chicken Horse, Stickfight, Pikuniku, Escaped Chasm, Dweller’s Empty Path, and A Short Hike have all been amazing, some for hanging out with friends, others just for getting some much needed introspection.

   Also, the Create mod for Minecraft has been super fun

3. Rouge-Lites

   Hades and Risk Of Rain 2 are both amazing games

4. A Cool Bedroom, a new bed, and a seperate computer room

   I’m sure you’ve read a thousand times, don’t work where you sleep. Yeah, it matters. For me, having basically no electronics in the bedroom helps as it prevents blinky LEDs from distracting from sleep

5. Good Underwear

   I may not have a butt, but it’s still nice to see myself and think “nice.”

6. Leatherman Skeletool

   I can’t tell you how many times this has saved me from needing to dig around for a pair of pliers or a screwdriver or knife. It doesn’t weigh anything either.

Entertainment #

Books #

1. Permanent Record

   Snowden tells it like it is. I think his life story is a must read for understanding the state of the union

2. What The Woods Keep

   A weird book, but something that kept me turning pages

3. Iron Druid Chornociles

   Fucking fanstanic.

Videos #

1. NYT’s ‘Day Of Rage’, The Alt Right Playbook, & The CIA is a Terrorist Organization

   These videos, all together, help paint a picture of the state of the US and how we got here from both political and personal perspectives

2. Animation is For Everyone

   This is just such a beautiful love letter to animation, and a fantastic dive into the entire industry

Other #

1. Brimstone Valley Mall

   Amazing characters and voice acting plus a compelling story is already great, but this managed to hit that nostolgia-for-a-time-I-wasn’t-alive vibe that I love

2. Future Football

   This story made me want to befriend multiple deep space probes

TV & Animation #

1. BNA

   Beatuiful animation and furry, I think I’m obligated to like this.

2. Umbrella Academy

   While the plot is astounding, the thing that really made this stick was how it managed to have so many layers of rediculous premise stacked together, yet still managed to suspend belief for the duration of each episode. It felt like each character was real despite how insane the situations got.

   The story is by Gerard Way too, so that makes the MCR fanboy in me happy as a bonus.

3. The Good Place

   Some of the humor was sitcom-y, and the characters a bit 1-dimensional. Still, the social commentry mixed with the touching story was great.

4. Love Death Robots

   The majority of these short stories really stick with you. Espically the neral-link moster fighting one- the animation for that one made the part of my brain that likes a well coreographed fight between monsters light up enough I just sorta made that dumb “dudeeeee, this is cooool” laugh.

5. She-Ra, Infinity Train, & KIPO

   Grouping these together as all three were good for the same reason: They gave me that same feeling of childhood levity mixed with adult levels of respect, they let me think about my own personality and feelings while still letting me feel comfortable. This is exactly what Avatar The Last Airbender did for me growing up and I think there being more shows like this is incredibly good.

6. Helluva Boss

   For independent animation, this is just amazing. The characters have stereotypes, yet depth. The animation is fun, and I’m continually awestruck at how much is packed into each episode.

7. The Boys

   Just a neat story. It’s not perfect, and sometimes it feels like it’s trying to be edgy, but still, 9/10

8. American Gods

   I said “What the fuck?” a lot. Still, the underlying examaninations and critiques of American society wrapped up into this multicultral stew made for some incredibly interesting storytelling and thoughts that lingered after each episode

Music #

1. Instrumental, post-rock-y, indie bands

   Electric Octopus, Gnome, Stone From The Sky, REZN, We Lost The Sea, etc. All of these bands have given me a love for musicians just jamming out and feeling their instruments, recording audio not midi notes, and feeling every beat.

Software #

1. Masterplan

   My thoughts tend to be pretty non linear and need a bunch of interconnections, dragging things into different groups depending on the task at hand- for that, this spacial TO-DO + planning system is great

2. Groupy

   Give Windows’ file explorer - along with any other application - tabs. Windows should really do this bulit in.

3. Noisedeck

   Make trippy visuals without writing complicated shaders

4. Typora

   Probably the best way to just write. I don’t want to worry about formatting and fonts and magrins constantly. This is straight forward and supports nearly everything I’d want, except for columns of text. It’s what I use to make OpGuides.

5. ORCA

   Music sequencing via an esoteric language, it feels like a completely new idea

6. Sectograph

   Schedule on the watchface itself, an absolute god send for reclaiming time

Mixed Bag #

Music Hardware #

1. EQD Disaster Transport Sr.

   Doesn’t have tap tempo, hard to get to good sounding settings. But, man, when you do it sounds amazing

2. Empress Zoia

   CPU power is a bit limited, UI sorta sucks, but the flexiblity and community patches make it oh so worth it.

3. Roli Blocks

   The Seaboard block is nice, though annoying that it needs turned on at every boot. The lightpad blocks (at least the 1st gen ones I have) are useless. The pressure curve sucks, mostly because they’re to hard to push in

4. EQD Sea Machine

   The vibrato and chorus of the seamachine are fanstatic, and the slapback delay morphing into a reverb is cool. The problem is you don’t always want a slapback or verb with your chorus or vibrato. Still, occasionally this pedal just makes me melt

Electronics #

1. Rock64

   Wanna know why people buy Raspberry PI’s over something less expensive and more powerful? It just works. The Rock64’s is fine, but some things just really didn’t want to work and I lost my patience multiple times.

2. Leap Motion

   Cool idea, no good applications

3. Monoprice Drawing Tablet

   Windows drivers are super fucked. Like, unusably fucked. Fortuanetly, it works perfectly in Linux.

4. Pwnagotchi

   Expensive, bulky, but cute and educational. I wouldn’t really recommend others build one, but the parts can always be repurposed anyway.

Life Stuff #

1. The Gamer Games

   Both Black Mesa and Halo Reach have been… meh? I remember playing and loving Halo 1 and 2 has a kid, but playing MCC on PC, so far I’m only though Reach, the campaign feels like a parody of itself somehow, like it’s trying to hard to be Halo. Black Mesa suffers from issues of unclear progression. Sometimes I found myself unsure of how to progress and there was nothing really to help me move forward, multiple times it went from fun and puzzle like to just outright frustrating. Still, both are good games in their own right and I don’t feel like I’ve wasted time.

2. Barefoot Shoes

   I haven’t really made up my mind on these yet. I have wide feet and toes, so letting them not get squished in the front taper of the shoe is awesome, and the feeling of the ground underneath my feet does make me feel more conected to everything, grounded in reality. They’re reasonably comfortable, but for a long day out, I think something with a squishy sole would probably be better

Entertainment #

Books #

1. Gate Mage Series

   The premise is good. The execution is a tad sloppy. That is to say it’s definitely an Orson Scott Card series. Also fuck Orson Scott Card.

2. 1984

   Classic? Sure. Still an interesting commentary on politics and a warning about surveillance? Yep. A bit dated and have some language about women that’s a bit uncomfortable? Also yes. 1984 isn’t a bad read, just, with limited time I’d say read Snowden’s book as priority over this.

Videos #

I don’t feel comfortably calling anyone out on bad videos, though I have noticed some creators trading off a casual, normal person style for a big creative but “I’m an entertainer” vibe, and I’m not a huge fan of that.

TV & Animation #

1. Mindhunters, Beastars, The Magicians, The Order, Erased, Blood Of Zeus

   Predictable, Cheesy, Getting Depressing, Characters lack depth, Cheesy, Unremarkable. Am I still glad I saw all of them? Sure. But none really went into recommend to friends territory.

Music #

1. Hyper-Pop

   I find Hyper-Pop musically interesting, but there’s no way I’d ever just sit down and listen to any of it

2. Nerd-Rap/Core

   (see Dual-Core, Graydon Square, etc.) is a really neat genre, yet I find a lot of walks this fine line of being fun and full of refrences I enjoy and of being something to show off like “ahh, you listen to that garbage, bah, I’m an 𝔦𝔫𝔱𝔢𝔩𝔩𝔢𝔠𝔱𝔲𝔞𝔩!” or, on the other side trying to hard to be cool and overly focusing on sex, drugs, and alcohol.

Software #

1. Renoise

   Renoise is great, but sometimes the user interface is less than obvious. It’s a super powerful tool, but almost asks that it be your most-used tool as design language, even outside the tracker interface, is different enough that not everything is as obvious as it should be

2. KiCad

   If you want to make something quickly, it’s great. The new SPCIE integration is so-so, and some times the workflow is awkward, espically if you make a mistake and then need to back-propagate your fix though each step

3. OpenSCad

   Cool idea, but lacks primatives and gets slow for complex designs

4. Fractal Bits

   I really, really want this to not be android exclusive. Just give me a VST or VCV version without needing to use the phone to generate the sounds and load them into SunVox.

5. GrainStorm

   Awesome app, but the UI needs a cleaner navigation system. I find myself scrolling though options one-by-one where I’d want a dropdown

6. VCV Rack

   By far my favorite software and really the thing I can’t stop recommending to people, so, why is it a mixed bag? Because it’s awful at talking to other software and hardware. The clocking is jittery, the offical VST version has been in development forever, and the community is pretty toxic.

How Did You Fuck This Up? #

Music Equipment #

1. Artiphon Orba

   The processor must be underpowered, as a lot of the expressive input that makes it cool feels quantized, like, there’s discrete points it’s snapping too beacuese it can’t process things fast enough. Also, can’t load in your own samples which is lame

2. Adventure Audio Merge

   Really should have gotten something with transformer I/O as ground loops are hell.

3. Bad Comrade V3

   Just, didn’t react to CV as I’d expect and needed awkwardly hot signals

4. Monoprice Planar Magnetics

   Small planar magnetic drivers are still small drivers and sound tinny

5. Launchkey MkII

   How does a keyboard fail at being a decent keyboard? Like, the keys wobble and have a super awkward feel that makes them suck for getting real velocity values out of the keyboard.

Electronics #

1. Lenovo Laptop

   Intel’s ‘U’ series chips are basically e-waste

2. Lexip Pu94

   Kickstarter may help you fund your hardware, you may even ship that hardware, but drivers are still a thing

3. Philips 278E1A - 4k 27" monitor

   It burnt in under 72 hours. It’s a monitor, how do you fuck this up?

4. Audio Interfaces

   So, my luck here has definitely been like opposite-of-winning-the-lottery bad. My original, baby’s first audio interface, the Presonus AudioBox USB, had issues with a constant high-pitch noise from USB power. So, I upgraded to a used Tascam 16x08, which promptely shit the bucket, then got a used Tascam 20x20 which also decided 6 months was all the life it had in it, so then I got a used Focusrite Scarlet 18i20 that came filled with live cockroaches. Thankfully, taking a fully can of spray to it and thoroughly soaking the unit in isopropol alcohol did the trick, and it’s working fine still, but come on!

Life Stuff #

1. Bad Games

   1. Penumbra

      Fuck mazes. Fuck mazes with an element of semi-random failure added on top 10x harder.

   2. GRIP VR

      I both really enjoy Grip, and hate it. It’s fun, but sometimes if you crash into a wall it can make your vision do very rapid flips and put you into instant-hurl territory

Entertainment #

Books #

1. Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Series

   These are slow burns. Like, worse than Tolkien slow. Then, all of a sudden, they’re very fast. Poor pacing makes me just want to quit reading them. So I did.

TV & Animation #

1. Jupiter’s Legacy

   This wasn’t worth watching. It was like cheesy superhero movie + cheesy adventure film + mental health breakdowns of characters you don’t actually care about

Software #

1. Blender

   Amazing, yet unstable as hell

2. Safer Community

   Insecure, Inconvenient, Slow to connect to the server, and buggy

3. Discord

   Memory leak on Linux for over a year. Fixed now, but really?