suck freak

Your custodian isn't used to being let out for walks, but she can see and you don't have a destination in mind so you let her take the lead. You have to assume she's picked up some kind of scent with how she starts scuttling forward with determination and no input from you.

You move at dawn before the warming air has you pulling her into an unlocked storm shelter. The hivebatch has been getting thinner and thinner, and even the convenience hive inside the hivestem you once lived in has been closed for more than a wipe after the last greenblood clerk went off planet. You worry more about drones than you do any bloodthirsty troll finding you nowadays.

When the air starts to cool you're out again, feeling the heat of the dying rays of sunlight through your clothes as your custodian ferries you through the maze of hiveclusters. You pass through the dump where you met Marsti, and later Charun, the same lot you and your moirail spent two wipes living out of before he came of age to enroll in helmstraining. It's nothing but a big pit now, heaps of trash vaporised and ready for shattered chunks of hivecluster to be shovelled over.

Your custodian grazes on dead lawnring while you fumble with the buttons of a meal dispenser you identified by the pulses of electricity you can feel running through it. The voucher you stole isn't working, and you can hear the machine beep out a jingle you associate with any piece of malfunctioning technology alerting you to an imminent drone strike. Kuprum would have fried the machine and peeled it open to get you whatever was inside like a fresh crustacean, but you hardly have the strength to scowl before urging your custodian to move on again. Your bilesac hurts too much to eat anything anyway.

The longer she scuttles along, the less you feel the pulses of psionic energy in your field. You must be heading out of the stemcluster entirely. You stop corralling her into hidden places, letting her get you out of the sunlight while you keep yourself quiet, enduring the pain in your head, your joints, your eyes, and all of your organs as they, you assume, start to shut down. The hours slip by. You sleep a lot.

When she finally slows, then stops to wander, you realize where she's taken you. It's the last place you got out of the hive to take her by yourself, when Kuprum was busy with training and your least favourite hatefriend was still alive and planetbound enough to whine about missing his field.

Fozzer Velyes' Pit Park. A cull field. An endless series of hexagonal holes in the ground, some covered over with dirt that house the corpses of trolls he couldn't just leave alone. You let out a breath that, perigees ago, would have been a laugh, but now only brings on several minutes of painful dryheaving. She brought you to a cullpit, to join the trolls already underground.

Your custodian wasn't the type to abandon her charge for dead. She'd only gotten clingier as the smell of death you gave off grew heavier, and now she had her antennae practically glued to your back as you slid down hers and onto the rocky ground.

Your landing is rough. Pain shoots through your joints, and you spend a while on the ground catching your breath while she clicks and buzzes.

Was this were you finally withered away? Fozzer had left you no shortage of pits to choose from. You never considered yourself to be someone who would ever give up on your life, fighting fang and frond against it and every troll that got in your way, but everything just hurt so badly, and you were so tired, and you were so hungry, and you were so angry. You remembered the names of every troll who'd ever seemed sympathetic to your state of being, every troll who seemed like they wanted to do something about the way the planet was structured, and who one by one boxed up their ideals to turn themselves into another soldier for the empress.

Tyzias. Fozzer. Dammek. Xefros. Daraya. Azdaja. Tegiri. Kuprum. Mallek. Chixie. Marsti.

They were all worthless wrigglers too scared to put their caegars where their ignorance gashes were when their numbers were called, but, you think, by abandoning you, they were going to live.

And you.

Were going.

To die.

You don't realize you're falling until it's too late. Your walkstub shifts in some loose gravel and you're tumbling nug over fronds into the empty pit fate picked out for you.

You hurt. You gasp. You do not get up.

There have been a few patches in the last few days where I've learned some interesting techniques but employed them towards very muddy ends, so those will probably live in storage forever. I've been slowly wrapping my head around things, especially using stereo utilities like Prox, Silhouette and Cold Mac in conjunction with LFOs and Vice Virga to create a constantly moving, interesting image.

Besides that, I took the time to read the full Nibbler manual instead of just the quickstart, and I have a better grasp of how to utilize it now - especially how they interact when crosspatched. I'm using the gate and stepped outputs to control all sorts of different parts of a patch, giving a longer structure that can be reorganized for lack of a better word by flipping switches. Multimod is also just being used as a clocked 8x LFO to great effect.

So more broad modulation aside, there are three parts:

Steady voice of three body pluck + drone into Silhouette, modulating the delay for bubbles again.

Pluck from Marbles in ratio mode with nibbler modulating T Bias, multed into DLD at two polymetric divisions, then those mixed together in Prox, with the two DLD channels swapping stereo positions via Vice Virga, then all through Desmodus.

Swell controlled with 0-ctrl pressure mixed into Prox as well.

I've been doing a lot of planning, a bit of reorganizing, and a little playing - life continues to be... what it is. In the immediate sphere, it's good things!

As is always the struggle, I'm trying to carve out more time for working on art and music. I've made a lot of changes to the "synth voice" case, getting rid of a lot of stuff that didn't fit my workflow and adding in some shiny new toys. I want to get to know this new system better, to decide if it works - the drum and texture cases feel like they have strong direction.

I'd asked before, if I want to put more finalized ideas on other platforms, what's my blog for? And I think the answer is that, every time I sit down, I should have a recording, and I should post it. Not that they'll all be good, or even listenable, but to be able to revisit what I've experimented with as part of the learning process - the same way you might flip through your old sketchbook, and find value in something you thought of as a throwaway before.

Anyway, this patch itself is using the bones of something from the weekend, that I didn't record - that A/B AR/Bouncing Ball envelope, with the initial attack and bouncy tail processed differently. The pluck here goes through DLD, crosspanned by Cold Mac; and the full sound through Silhouette which is receiving an envelope into focus (creating the bubbly sound) and a sequence into spot - there are a few other plucks going into other inputs for overlapping rhythms when spot is modulated.