smart girls talking

While I was away from my keyboard at the start of the year, Dr. Stéphane Pigeon was busy creating a bunch of new soundscapes! Here's a round up of all the new generators he's posted this year:

The Nyquist Frontier: An electronic music generator that sounds like it's coming straight to you from the 1980s. I felt like The Pet Shop Boys were about to start singing at any moment. Comes with a little history lesson about synthesizers.

Glacier Lagoon: Recorded in Iceland! Lots of different water noises here, including ice. Play around with the sliders to combine them. I like the "Fresh Water" presets with lapping waves and some of the underwater recordings (the four on the right) thrown in.

Flock Of Flutter: Well, this isn't what it sounds like at all. It's not birds, it's a Swiffer duster attached to a motor that causes it to brush against crumpled kraft paper, creating a warm white noise (though perhaps closer to what's called pink noise), similar to the steady hum of a fan.

Organic White: A white noise generator created from carefully selected recordings of wind and rain. Unlike synthetic white noise, which is unchanging, this has a bit more texture and variation to it.

Indigo Amanita: Dr. Pigeon's attempt at Goa Trance, which I'm unfamiliar with, but is, apparently, a genre of electronic dance music that originated in the early 1990s in the Indian state of Goa. It's upbeat.

Floating: From Dr. Pigeon's description: An ambient soundscape for deep relaxation, Floating avoids rhythm and melody, using slowly evolving textures and warm low-frequency tones to help the mind slow down by removing musical expectations.

Upstream: This soundscape traces the path of a waterfall back to its source, a small stream.

Uganda Tales: Recorded on the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda. I recommend trying the presets to experience the many different pairings of natural sounds, music, and human speech this soundscape offers.

Glacier Chorus: More from Iceland. This time it's underwater sounds recorded in a glacier lagoon. Dr. Pigeon writes, "At times, you might think you're hearing birds or sea creatures. But these sounds don't come from any animals. They all are the voice of the glacier itself. As the glacier melts, the ice cracks and groans under its own heavy weight and small rocks that were once frozen inside are freed and tumble down the ice. Underwater, tiny air bubbles that were trapped in the ice pop and fizz as they escape."

Gong Bath — ft. Reggie Hubbard: A meditation in vibrations, taken from a live recording during a public sound bath at Kripalu. Dr. Pigeon writes, "These are not sounds that say, 'everything is fine.' These are sounds that ask questions. That challenge your sense of ease. That's why gongs are so powerful in meditation: they don't lull you — they awaken you. They agitate the quiet — revealing what usually lies buried beneath." Which is a very generous way to say that this sounds like the soundtrack to a horror movie.

The Architect's Eclipse: Space ambient music. This one sounds like a more relaxed version of the soundtrack to the movie Cube.

Icelandic Shores: A sea, wind, and rain noise generator. Very similar vibes to that of the beloved Irish Coast Soundscape, only recorded in Iceland. This is for you if you like your beaches cold and windy.

Now we're all caught up!

If you want to keep up with the myNoise news, Dr. Pigeon has left corporate social media, but there are plenty of other ways to get updates. You can follow myNoise.net on Mastodon or wherever you access the Fediverse. You can subscribe to his mailing list that notifies you of new soundscapes. Or you can follow the myNoise RSS feed in your favorite RSS reader or here at Dreamwidth at mynoise_feed.

You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible, by Margaret Eby:

A gentle and funny book about how to feed yourself when that seems impossible.

This book offers three things: permission, inspiration, and recipes, in about those proportions if this were a list of ingredients. The chapters are arranged in increasing order of effort, from, basically, eating straight out of the fridge, right up to chopping stuff up and turning on the oven.

Each chapter starts with a theme and a bunch of ideas about how to turn things like eggs, greens, beans, noodles, dumplings, and canned foods into a meal, then finishes with one or two basic "do exactly this" recipes. The permission is throughout. Yes, it's okay to eat popcorn for dinner. Yes, a dip is a meal. Yes, you can just eat cheese with your hands. I gotta say, though, there is A LOT of cheese and dairy in this book. And, it's true, if I could eat dairy, a lot of my eating problems would be solved, but alas.

Still, I love the energy of the book and how funny and relentlessly kind Eby is. From the introduction:

When food felt like a chore, I kept reminding myself: the best food is the food that you'll eat. This is the mantra of this book. Michael Pollan famously had three rules for eating: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." That's nice for him! Here, we're gonna stop with the first one. And we're going to make it easy.

And there are a lot of easy ideas in here! Frittatas! Hummus! Smoothies! For when you're too tired to even chew!

This is more of a survival guide than a cookbook, though, as some of the cooking advice is a bit on the thin side, and if you're new to cooking, you might not know, for example, that you'll want to undercook pasta if you're putting it into a casserole, something Eby fails to mention. The book is probably best for someone who already knows the basics, but just can't imagine lifting a spoon or picking up a frying pan. Eby has a lot of suggestions for things to cook in the toaster oven and the microwave, and the most involved this book gets is casseroles and stirfrys. There are even two (2) quick desserts.

Recommended! Though if you have dietary restrictions, you'll have to do the extra work yourself to make this book work for you (just like every other day) and large sections of it might not, but I think it's still worth it for the inspiration and the reminder to go easy on yourself. You're doing the best you can.

What if your life was a TV show? Would you be the star or a background character?

Willis Wu lives and works in Chinatown and dreams of being Kung Fu Guy, just like his father before him, but Will's role in life—or in the script—is more Generic Asian Man Number Three. Then he falls for Attractive Lady Cop and has to make a choice between a family life in the suburbs or the job he's always wanted.

This is one of those stories that's more about an idea than a character, and more a thesis than a story. The idea is interesting and the thesis is credible—and completely spelled out for you in a courtroom scene at the end in case you somehow missed it—but the characters have the stock feel of a parable and gave me little reason to care about their struggles as they toil in a system that's been stacked against them for centuries.

The system is racist as shit and Yu supports this with real world examples but doesn't do much to personalize it for his characters. He does dramatize it, literally, as parts are in script format, but even much of that is intentionally clichéd, and despite some early ??? as I wondered what the fuck was going on, I didn't find this challenging or exciting, but I think it did what it meant to.

Contains: cops; racism (including stereotypes and slurs); elder care; poverty; generational trauma; pomo; second person perspective.