mihono.moe

sea of stars (wip?)

Unknown — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

listen</h2>
</audio>

thoughts</h2>
playing around with the hapax and its midi effect modules, as well as blueprinting a process for taking a small solo piano piece and building a more electronic ambience out of it.
really liking how the midi echo works on the hapax, it's not effective to emulate things like dotted eighth delay (it works but it doesn't have the same vibe and the vibe is essential there), but just as a general delay smearing it's really nice to have. I threw some lfo on the velocity but from looking at the resulting MIDI in ableton, I think the hapax snapshots the velocity at note on and doesn't update it when generating arps / echoes from that initial note on
the process I'm blueprinting involves making a very simple bass figure to set the harmony bed and rhythm (in this case a simple i v i' v, arpeggiation, which isn't the most inspiring but at least it's a clear way to divide the bar and more interesting than straight 4s or 8s). after that, putting together an incredibly simple motive and expanding it out with a bit of variation. the math (conditional trig) on notes is incredibly powerful, letting me set 4 bars and make some small changes to create an 8 bar pattern without needing to duplicate and extend.
I then PROMPTLY ignored the short melodic phrase in favor of smashing the notes into a big long generative bit by taking the notes used per bar and using those as the fodder for the arp, but I can imagine that it wouldn't be terribly difficult to take the melody I built out and transform it into a slower, more drawn-out version of itself.
I don't know if the resulting effort is "good" in terms of interestingness but it feels like the elements of a pretty solid basic process to start working with.

experiments on 'inventions for electric guitar' by manuel göttsching

Unknown — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

listen</h2>
</audio>

thoughts</h2>
if you haven't heard inventions for electric guitar (1975) by manuel göttsching before, you should probably go listen to it. he apparently recorded it in his kitchen because the reverb there was better. (he unplugged the refrigerator)
echowaves, the first track on the album, is just göttsching doubletracking interlocking sequences along with delay for a textural wash. i toyed with the idea (largely the doubletracking and delay aspect more than the strict counterpoint aspect) to see what ended up happening. quite like the result, though I think if I were going to use it in a track I would a) actually attempt contrapuntal textures and b) not turn the dotted eighth delay send to 100%. pretty sure I slapped reverb on there too, though I tried to be tasteful. I think.

improvisation with triadic harmony

Unknown — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

listen</h2>
</audio>
thoughts</h2>
improvisation after a bit of simple sound design (this is just a classic saw pad with lfo on the filter and reverb to taste)
trying specifically to play with three-note harmony and keeping things moving smoothly through the changes rather than trying to outhink the concept of harmony at the speed of playing. there's no real tonal direction here (not that I was trying for one anyway), so just think of this as "catgirl sits on the keys" and you'll be most of the way there.

new music section added to web site

Unknown — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

after several general life crises hitting me all simultaneously (nothing scary, just a lot of "oh shit I actually have to adult now, who allowed this to happen") I might start using this web site again! oh no
anyway to make it easier for me to share or link music sketches and thoughts and so on I built out a new part of the web site. you can click on the /music link in the header, or you can just click here</a>.
okay but why share all this</h3>
something that I noticed while going through the process of self-learning a bunch of things (music, programming, creative writing, literary criticism, fighting games, sewing, whatever) is that there's often a very poor public record of what it looks like when you're learning a new skill. people throw around the ira glass quote way too much and while it's very true, I have historically found it difficult to find, understand, and grasp what it actually looks, feels, seems like when you are a beginner and intermediate learner in a particular field. people usually group up and create a small circle of people around the same level and workshop and learn with each other until they're ready to share their work (really, their progress) with the world at large.
this means a lot of what that early, beginner and intermediate work, the "still learning" work, gets left in dustbins and cutting room floors. it never gets organized. it never sees the light of day (unless you get famous enough that an archive collects what's left and calls it juvenalia). this means there's not a lot of external models of what learning and progressing in a skill before you get to the point you share it with the world exists, something that I think is a valuable and important resource in an era marked by heavy amounts of autodidactism. you see this a lot with people Going Through It with their skill-based hobby, struggling to move past the invisible line between "amateur" and "professional" (invisible and largely imaginary, since the line is effectively self-confidence).
now, I've been working at music and music production skills for quite a few years off and on as a hobby, but I've only just recently started to feel comfortable and grasp that I could, in fact, put my work out there. I still feel like I'm "learning" (especially the art of finishing something, rather than living in the world of infinite sketches, which really isn't an issue honestly). I also like sharing things, sometimes for attention but mostly just because I like sharing things in the hopes of other people enjoying them and, crucially, helping building up my own confidence in what I am doing. I also firmly believe that having a record of someone's progress through the parts of a practice that are difficult for them is important, arguably more important that having a body of "official", approved, vetted, and polished work. portfolios and releases and other victories are the high watermarks, not the steady churn.
the development of an artist (or any sort of technically demanding skill, really) is largely the product of their failures, and processes learned from those failures, which if you only follow and consume the exhibited end products you never see (you'll recognize this if you've read art & fear). so I think it's important, more than releasing finished products, to release and make public the unfinished products, the abandoned wips, things you tried before you abandoned that pathway for your own interests. this is something I think the internet is fairly uniquely suited for.
I remember, fairly clearly, the moment I was listening to music has the right to children and understanding that actually, no, the haphazard sounds and song concepts I was working on were not so dissimilar to what boards of canada were working with, even if it didn't feel that way because they had an album and I didn't (also I don't work in their genre, really). and I think, perhaps, that while that was a bit of a revelatory experience, it's also good to be able to have that feeling much sooner, and with work that's doesn't have that particular cultural reputation conveyed upon it. we should all be able to listen to philosophy of the world and realize that, yes, actually, you can make music, or whatever you're into, and it doesn't fucking matter what it's like. the world, in general, will be a better place with more art.

on seeing, being seen, and performative sexualities

Unknown — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

some personal thoughts on visibility and paranoia</h3>
something that usually gets at me a lot is the constant sense of Being Seen. some of this comes from complex childhood traumas (thanks mom, helps a lot), some of this comes from being adjacent to online communities with a known habit of stalking and doxxing people, some of this comes from having had a very minor taste of being a Source for Information on the Internet once upon a time. these things are very far behind me, but a lot of the latent paranoia and sense that I need to be constantly looking behind my back remains.
this manifests itself in physical spaces in very specific ways:

I tend to avoid cameras and anything that might reproduce myself. I first noticed this walking around campus as an undergrad, finding myself walking very far out of my way to avoid walking in front of a local news filming crew doing a story. </li>

I minimize contact with mirrors and reflective surfaces as much as possible. </li>

I keep a minimal wardrobe and dress inconspicuously. </li>

I walk very quietly almost all the time. </li> </ul>
on online spaces, though, it comes out as a constant fear of someone being Upset at Something I Did or Said Online. it's rejection sensitive dysphoria, but with the backing of some deep-set paranoid thoughts magnifying every possible thing I do or don't do online into the wrong thing to do or not do that will give me severe real-life repercussions.
none of these things have ever happened to me, of course, but it doesn't stop the fear of One Day, They Will.
the spectre of 'sexuality' has entered the room</h3>
PICTURED: author (right) holding up a ward to unsuspecting readers who might be mildly surprised to see sex show up in this post topic (left)
very much adjacent to this is my relationship with my body and sexuality and how that manifests itself. I've been very much on the complex side of sexuality, having a largely asexual disposition but having a really keen interest in sex and sexual expression as an activity. I didn't really have a super religious or conservative upbringing, but I can definitely feel that I've been affected by sexual repression on some level. this is something I've been working on in 2025, trying to unmesh the fear that underpins a lot of my sexuality and sexual expression.
historically, the thought of having my somewhat public self associated with the more private sexual self has been a key driving factor of a lot of these paranoid fears that stem from the fear of being seen: someone is going to having an unwanted Anime Tity placed in front of their eyes, and they will be upset, and judge me, and loathe me, and write opprobrium about me, etc etc etc. there is a point in time in which this fear is somewhat genuine, where the pressures of polite culture dictate that talking about Sex is something you do in nuanced critique and academic language, not pressing a button that lets all of your followers and cohort see that you enjoy Patchouli Knowledge's noncanonical bust size a healthy amount.
fig. A: Patchouli Knowledge, with flat chest, from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (2002), as drawn by ZUN
the thing is, even when that was a reasonable thing to have to mind, it really isn't. even just the thought of it goes against the actual core belief I have that who fuckin' cares what someone's sexual proclivities are?. I sure as hell don't care if I see someone like something with a sexual connotation, nor do I think that they're putting it in front of me because they're inescapably horny at that very specific moment. I sure as hell spend a lot of time looking at heavily erotic and sexual images without a single iota of hormonal uptick, just acknowledgement that it's aesthetically pleasant to look at and other people should know that, the same way I might share an article that I haven't really read because it might be relevant to the interest of someone who sees it later.
other forms of reluctance at being seen</h3>
another thing that specifically holds me back with regards to this specific paranoia of being seen is that I have a pretty wide spectrum of interests and I use social media in very specific ways that deliberately go against the nature of being a person with a monointerest in one specific topic and only focusing on that. if someone follows me because I put out some music at some point, I worry they don't also want any number of other interests of mine: literature, anime, music outside the genre I record, video games, science fiction, history, media criticism, software development, whatever. it's been very difficult for me to try to be a person with a singular interest, or be in singular interest spaces. in fact, I'd argue that a lot of my current crisis state comes from invisible and unintentional pressure from my job to be a monointerest and exclude all the fields listed above.
I talked about sexuality first, and I think it's standing in for the entire feeling of having to try and package myself down into an easily digestible sound bite for the consumption of other humans, the corporeal manifestation of a blurb. if I can't even vaguely feel comfortable sharing a different interest than someone might know me by without fear of being judged, then the deeply personal aspect of individual sexuality is going to take the brunt of damage since it's at least plausible that someone who likes video games might also like Borges.
there's a lot of other fears at being pre-judged by others based on whatever I say that usually leads me to be incredibly taciturn about myself and reluctant at best to talk about what I genuinely like because of a fear of being stereotyped or pigeonholed into a singular stereotypical box that holds no possibility of expressing the complex whole that my existence is. I'm working on several angles of attack on this particular problem at the moment, but it's good, I think, to acknowledged the interconnected nature of everything
is there a point to all this</h3>
not really, this entire post is an excuse to give myself permission to reskeet anime boobs on bluesky.
that's a lie, it's to reflect on why I think I need to give myself permission and an excuse to reskeet anime boobs on bluesky.

book review: the terraformers (newitz, 2023)

Unknown — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000


really wanted to like this a lot more than I ended up liking it.
it's not bad by any stretch. there's a lot that's interesting inside this book: from smaller concepts, like the organic living buildings and a group of worms solving the traveling merchant problem, to larger ones, like the tendency for history to fade into mythology and the contrast of self-governance to corporate colonialism. the big one (and probably the most compelling argument to check it out) is the way the setting sets out equal standing for hominids and other species; the ability of technology in the setting to create a continuous wireless communication network between members of different species, along with the emphasis on granting all species autonomy and rights, is probably the most compelling reason to read the book. even past that, there's clearly a lot of Ideas here, and they're all, individually, good Ideas to be working with.
the problem for me set in partway through the first part of the book. the pacing felt tremendously off -- events moving so fast I felt like I barely had time to process a variety of character actions that seemed to lurch suddenly to villany. it wasn't until I hit the first timeskip between part 1 and part 2 that I realized that the book was a generational saga.
part 2 was more coherent (I would not be surprised to learn that the second portion of the book was some of the earliest written material) but suffered from the same pacing structure as part 1: a lesiurely tour through a lot of interesting locales until the plot needs to resolve and characters abruptly jaunt halfway across the planet before you have a chance to think about it.
part 3 had a lot of the most interesting and fascinating concepts in the whole book to this point: for instance, there's a discursion at a game jam in an underground bar where the main POV character (a train, which is honestly kinda sick) rifles through a bunch of historical data in an inscrutable video game while two other characters bicker about game design. it's a genuinely fascinating bit of history about the setting that hadn't ever really been touched on before then -- the fact that there are no records of the origin of the Environmental Rescue Team and that its originators exist primarily as legal documents and vague ideas of concepts. and yet after a few pages of this we're bundled back into the plot vehicle (in this case, literally) and off to another digression on something else. it's not even until I write this that I realize there's the entire possibility that humans in this setting are entirely artificial, the originals annihilated in the anthropocene and only kept around as genetic templates by robots or species that came after us.
the end result of all the rush is that rather than feeling like a complete generational saga that wrestles with its big themes of environmentalism, colonialism, capitalism, and self-determination over the course of centuries, it feels like a collection of ideas about what a generational saga like that would look like, and a guided tour over the crucial elements of such a narrative. it's not a dealbreaker if the characters don't get a tremendous amount of development in a book like this, but to simultaneously shortsell the setting when it embodies the core themes is disappointing. I want to say it would work refigured as a trilogy; I worry that there just isn't enough substance inside each of the three parts to merit such an expansion. it could very definitely have used a couple hundred more pages, just to let the pace settle down and focus on something for longer.
the terraformers is worth a read for the relatively strong vision it sets out for a universe where hominids and other species share equal rights and standing and commuincate with each other, and the optimism for people's capacity to push back against corporate capitalism and colonialism is really sorely needed now even more than when it was published. everything else never quite gets the time it needs to shine.

unreasonably irritated by the concept of the 'maker movement'

Unknown — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

warning: here be stress venting</h2>
sensibility is not guaranteed, for a refund I refer to you to the price of reading the web site, which is "free"</h3>
summary: programming projects on temporary hold due to Burnout Recovery, but do expect some post on my Very Own Useless Programming Language (spoilers: its a fucked up Lisp)

I'm very grumpy from burnout from work and autism both simultaneously, and work is "I run a publically accessible makerspace" and honestly I'm quite happy with the role I am developing for myself in that space at this moment but due to several factors I'm just really frazzled and burnt out with the whole ass fucking thing and the movement / concept in general. specifically the fucked up way it seems to be hegemonically Cisgender Male in some very weirdly specific ways. it's worth mentioning that as of this writing the structure of the library system I currently work is causing me no small amount of stress in and of itself (this is par for the course for public libraries unfortunately).
very generally: I think DIY is cool! I think the principles that it runs on (just do it yourself, learn how to do things) mesh well with me, I like learning and understanding how things work and taking some time to learn these things has been, generally, very pleasant. there's a lot of value is knowing how things like 3D printers and laser cutters and shit work, and even just interfacing with creative people in general and being able to share some technical knowledge is a really good thing.
do it yourself is also a cool anime you might have not watched so you should do that
the problem that I run across, and this might be a symptom of where I work and who I work with, is that lurking underneath all this is the gnawing sense that this is the only thing that has value, ever. there's a lot of STEM vs humanities lurking around, and since taking on this role and position I have felt that a lot of what I value (which is the humanities! I work in a library! we are all about the motherfucking humanities!) has been gradually sucked away by "look at this cool thing someone did on Hackaday" and it's a just a fucking box with a screen that plays bad apple to people who don't even know who Masayoshi Minoshima even is, let alone who ALSTROMERIA RECORDS are and where they came from.
it's irritating not because these things don't have value, or aren't worth building. I would love putting together a stupid box that plays caramelldansen at you. putting anime girls on OpenGL cubes is how I learned I hate bare metal graphics programming. a lot of these technology-driven things are things I have genuine interest in, but I feel like it's become too closely connected with this weird leviathan lurking under the surface of the maker movement in general that says "you have to do everything yourself." it's entirely possible this is just a figment of my own internal machinery, some monstrous neurodivergent Moby Dick trying to turn everything into a hyperfixation, but this heavily STEM-focused mindset feels like it's actively poisoning my brain in this position. I somehow feel like my capacity for complex thinking and processing has atrophied trying to survive in this kind of space. that could also just be the function of the burnout, but the burnout is directly related to feeling like I need to do and know everything.
it does not help that the people I work with directly are very openly more tech-driven engineering types and not people who have ever learned to process culture. "culture" is "how much Content can I Consume as quickly as possible" and, funnily enough, lines up perfectly well with mainstream tastes in their chosen genres and media. it definitely doesn't help that these people are Cisgender Men and despite the stated queerness that exists it's still very much a bunch of guys being dudes.
it also pisses me off how much Gender I have to deal with. parents bringing their boys (and it's almost always boys) over to learn how the cool whizbang 3D printer makes a useless trinket (I am building a collection of fidgets other people print, it's probably my favorite thing that happens on the job right now) and talk like it's something they should be interested in. there's some really sharp and enthusiastic engineer-minded kids that have crossed paths with me on this job and I genuinely hope they follow their passion, but it drives me off the wall when Parent No. 45387290 brings little Kevin (age 8, and a little shit who's clearly not even half interested in any of this but loves reticulated dragons) over to effectively enculturate them into Science.
ironically I'm having the best long-term success with women, specifically those invested in textile arts. embroidery is Big, sewing is Big, these tasks create interesting problems that are more aesthetic than technical in concern, and when technicality is needed it's clearly in service to an aesthetic goal, rather than "the slicer fucked up again".
short term I am going to refocus myself on more aesthetic concerns, like music composition and production, and probably learn more audio engineering (technically this relates to work, but I also am actively using it rather than having it foisted upon me, so I am having fun rather than feeling like I've drug work home for now). if I do any programming progress it will be as part of personal free time at work rather than something I try to shove at myself at home.

what is play? we just don't know

Unknown — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I've been poking at jesse schell's Art of Game Design as something to engage my brain with during certain downtime points at work this week and I feel like I'm already staring down the "am I wrong or just in the incorrect universe" question. it's a very good read so far and I think the lenses talked about are very helpful even outside the scope of game design in terms of outlining what is a "useful" question to ask or interrogate when designing something, especially when I'm feeling like "design" is a difficult task for me when I already try to compact a lot of decisions into heuristics and heuristic chains rather than apply what I assume is "creative thought" to a problem.
an example: let's take music. there's a lot of music forms (sonata form, canon, verse-chorus, etc) that largely exist to provide the scaffolding for a generalized exploration of a musical concept, and this is largely to make the process of exploring the musical concept easier to deal with - there's a set pattern, you can follow a structure, there's a fairly large decision made for you that you don't need to make again. this makes Sense to my brain, like I Get It. and then when I sit down to try to work within a particular structure it just does not work. I understand what the task at hand is: take a bit of rhythm and frequencies and fuss around with them in various ways to move away and come back to the origin point to some degree. but I get stuck at the "fuss around with them in various ways" portion - this bit doesn't sit with me, because I don't understand what it means, or how to do what it means, and when I try it I either immediately lose the original idea (turning it into through-composition or ambient timbral soundscape, which isn't necessarily incorrect either) or it sounds artificial, like it was created through algorithm (which, by running it through heuristics, it more or less is).
essentially "fuss around with things in various ways" is more or less this giant black box to me, a sort of imposing instruction where the only practical advice to be given is "idk just do something I guess" which has never sat well with me. there's no framework for that part, and I don't understand what is meant by that. or rather I do understand what is meant by it, because I can observe it and recognize it as what is happening and appreciate it, but I don't understand how to do it myself. it feels like there is a concrete, internal process that I don't have that is supposed to be like "just do shit it'll be fun", or if it is there it gets immediately overridden by a strong need to know a procedure and methodology to follow, a template or pattern, a definite answer, something that isn't provided by the frameworks of structure and form.
I'm like 95% certain that this is just undiagnosed autism and it's just been throwing a wrench at me for most of my life. I have never liked doing things just to see what happens, because I find that what I care about is knowing what happens before I do them. and from what I can tell, there seems to be a basic assumption amongst the (neurotypical?) world that "doing things just to see what happens" is a concrete requirement for whatever "play" or "creativity" is. I don't necessarily think that I lack "creativity" since systemic thinking, logical thinking, and analytical thinking all require it, but I definitely feel like I have a shortage on whatever is generally meant by the term "creativity", and I can't remember if I had it and forgot, or never had it to begin with.

web site and virtual machines

Unknown — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

wow I have modified a design into something I vaguely actually like, amazing. definitely super original.

random interest in building a virtual machine resurfaced and I am considering if a CHIP-8 VM is something I should consider making or if I should skip the "try to be a Real Computer but Virtually" process and just make some unhinged monstrosity again like the Ferry VM. which I still cannot believe works when I do things like "push an entire array onto the stack since the stack isn't a real stack but a fake stack of arbitrarily sized objects living on the heap" (it does not run very well, but it is a distinct improvement than the tree-walk interpreter, and I was not about to learn addressing when I could make it work instead)
a fantasy console sounds kinda neat and would be a useful thing to make in a VM mood, but I expect I should probably either buckle down with bevy (which feels overengineered for my use cases) or learn godot. although I think Actual Design Iteration is the thing I need to address more than anything, but a less stressful interaction with creation through the magic of Visual Editor that Godot offers might be a good thing, I guess.

mihono_stare.jpg

Unknown — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

we hired this cyborg horse girl to stare blankly into space at you

mihono.moe

sea of stars (wip?)

listen</h2>
</audio></p>

experiments on 'inventions for electric guitar' by manuel göttsching

listen</h2>
</audio></p>

improvisation with triadic harmony

listen</h2>
</audio></p>

new music section added to web site

on seeing, being seen, and performative sexualities

is there a point to all this</h3>
not really, this entire post is an excuse to give myself permission to reskeet anime boobs on bluesky.</p>
that's a lie, it's to reflect on why I think I need to give myself permission and an excuse to reskeet anime boobs on bluesky.</p>

book review: the terraformers (newitz, 2023)

unreasonably irritated by the concept of the 'maker movement'

warning: here be stress venting</h2>

what is play? we just don't know

web site and virtual machines

mihono_stare.jpg

mihono.moe

sea of stars (wip?)

listen</h2> </audio></p>

experiments on 'inventions for electric guitar' by manuel göttsching

listen</h2> </audio></p>

improvisation with triadic harmony

listen</h2> </audio></p>

new music section added to web site

on seeing, being seen, and performative sexualities

is there a point to all this</h3> not really, this entire post is an excuse to give myself permission to reskeet anime boobs on bluesky.</p> that's a lie, it's to reflect on why I think I need to give myself permission and an excuse to reskeet anime boobs on bluesky.</p>

book review: the terraformers (newitz, 2023)

unreasonably irritated by the concept of the 'maker movement'

warning: here be stress venting</h2>

what is play? we just don't know

web site and virtual machines

mihono_stare.jpg

listen</h2>
</audio></p>

listen</h2>
</audio></p>

listen</h2>
</audio></p>

is there a point to all this</h3>
not really, this entire post is an excuse to give myself permission to reskeet anime boobs on bluesky.</p>
that's a lie, it's to reflect on why I think I need to give myself permission and an excuse to reskeet anime boobs on bluesky.</p>