#logbook entry

08/12/3310 Current system: Fehu

I’ve made it back to civilisation. Not quite the Bubble, mind you. I’m a few jumps away from the nearest inhabited system and 468Ly from Sol. For months, I’ve been dreaming about this day. Finally talking with real humans, sitting down to eat proper food, renting a room with a comfortable bed. It didn’t turn out quite how I was expecting. I was finally able to catch up on the news and found out that the last Titan moved closer to the core systems, and that there are Thargoids all around Sol... and around Tau Ceti. My home. And, that multiple rescue megaships have been ambushed and destroyed. Haven’t heard back from any of my family or friends after I tried to contact them.

This is overwhelming.

24/10/3309 Current system: 2MASS J03291977+3124572 Docked at: Ring Mine

Made it to Ring Mine. First human contact in over a month. It was nice to hear another voice, but I wonder if I’m going to be able to sleep tonight. I had forgotten about how noisy starports can get. That constant low rumble. Distant echoes of the announcements over the PA system. Life. I’ve become used to the silence of deep space and the wind on the ice.

I received no less than two awards upon turning in the data and samples I’d collected over the past month. I am now an Elite I Explorer and an Elite Exobiologist. Feeling quite proud and accomplished.

It has now been a month since I arrived in the Pleiades Sector and the Pleiades nebula and what a learning experience this has been! I’ve met Thargoids (and survived), I’ve successfully landed on high-gravity bodies without even damaging my shields, I’ve found new types of life I had never seen before, I’ve visited a number of abandoned settlements, I’ve found large Thargoid surface structures, I’ve helped rescue people, I’ve seen several black holes, and of course, I’ve been enjoying unique views of the nebula from all kinds of distances and angles.

For the most part, I’ve actually been spending the month following the trails hinted at by the listening posts scattered throughout the place. Finding the listening posts is fairly easy, but finding what system they refer to is another matter, and it’s been a lot of trial and error. It’s not all bad though; this gave me the opportunity to visit some systems I might not have stopped at.

The Thargoids are everywhere here. Overall, it almost seems like this area has now found some sort of balance between human and Thargoid spaces. The ones I’ve met were mostly indifferent towards humans, unless we get too close to their space -- I suppose that’s what happened to the burning megaships and capital ships I found drifting in green clouds. I’m not always sure how to interpret their intentions when they turn around to face me and do that thing with the green tendrils. (Some sort of scan?) They do seem to be pretty secretive and not enjoy being probed or approached too closely.

I did visit some abandoned settlements dating back to the war and the Thargoid incursions though, and they often had heart-wrenching stories to tell. So many people killed, forced to evacuate, or even left for dead. Sometimes it seems the Thargoids were only reacting to what the people had been doing and were angry at humans; other times it seems the settlements were attacked just because they happened to be there. There was a story of a merciful Thargoid who just turned around and left, though. I’ve read that they probably have some sort of a hive mind, but I wonder how individual decisions come into play.

One time, I visited an abandoned penal colony that had been attacked by Thargoids. Everything was empty as I listened to the voice of the probably long-dead Chief warden on the logs I downloaded, but then I must have accidentally restored power and the automated settlement defences came back to life and started shooting at me. I managed to dismiss my ship before she was damaged, and escaped, full throttle on, with the SRV. That was terrifying. My heart is still racing as I am writing this.

There’s something else, though. Coded messages hidden here and there. Whispers about men in black and paramilitary groups shutting down operations. Strange ships appearing out of nowhere, guns out and ready to shoot down anyone without asking any questions. I don’t want to get in too much trouble, but I must admit I feel tempted to go and stick my nose in there and figure out what the hell is going on. The bad guys might not be the octagonal aliens themselves...

I don't know how long I am going to stay here, but there is more to find in this area, so I am going to do my best to follow all those trails before moving on. (The question then is, will I go back to the Bubble, or deeper into the Black? That remains to be seen.)

Bark mounds! These were surprisingly difficult to find.

A Thargoid Basilisk.

08/10/3309

3rd June 3309 CPD-60 604

Do you know what’s even more exhilarating than canyon running?

Canyon running in my exploration ship full of exobiological data worth dozens of millions. I obviously didn’t go as fast as I would with the Eagle, but I found some nice canyons to play in for a bit.

4th June 3309 SUMMANUS A3

Watched a total eclipse that happened to be occurring just as I approached body A3.

Overheated and passed out, but must have managed to get myself back to the safety of my ship before getting toasted to a crisp.

Landed on A2, climbed a mountain to go look at A3, then raced 1.30km back to the ship before the star rose, because I didn’t feel like trying my luck again and didn’t want to risk overheating again so soon. Will have to take it easy for the next couple of days, getting almost cooked in my suit was rather unpleasant.

[There is also a timelapse video of the eclipse on my YT channel here]

7th June 3309 HECATE

Ran some quick delivery missions and visited the Daunting Hammer, a megaship located in a system also featuring a ringed ammonia world. This might be the first time one of these.

9th June 3309 GAT 1373 A1A

This system has a white dwarf that is visible from the moon I landed on to pick up some plant samples. I can’t quite see the jet cones from here, which is probably a good thing. I am not sure just how much radiation my suit can handle but I doubt it was designed to withstand that kind of thing.

10th June 3309 NGOBE

Found a ship crash site. Seemed recent, there was still smoke coming from what seems to have once been a Viper. The worst part in this was finding the pilot’s body, someone called Conrad Lynn. No idea where to even start looking to identify and notify his next of kin.

21st June 3309 PLEIADES SECTOR OI-T C3-7

The Pleiades nebula has been calling my name for a while and it’s now getting bigger and bigger in the sky. I made a halt in 48 Epsilon Arietis, where I landed on a moon (4B) with a lovely view of a gas giant and the blue supergiant. The past 10 days or so have been mostly uneventful and I found myself more tired than usual, so I’ve spent a good part of my time just resting in my ship and preparing for the next jump.

This system I am in has Thargoid-related signals. I hesitated for a while before getting any closer, but curiosity got the upper hand. I found something like... big barnacles, surrounded by a green cloud. And it made... sounds. I am unsure what it is, but it is unlike any other organic life form I’ve seen before.

Also. There’s a listening post in this system. So my short-term objective is to visit the other two systems it references, triangulate them, and get to the bottom of this.

23rd June 3309 DELPHI

Been exploring around this system, where I found one other listening post related to the one I visited the other day. And a port called The Oracle, as a reference to some ancient Earth myth. Found a lot of crashed Thargoid ships here with apparently active (and toxic) sensors. I’ve seen these before, but it was only just one. These wrecks had so many! It’s also interesting seeing a Thargoid ship like this from up close. Those things are large.

Speaking of seeing them up close... I met a Basilisk. A living one. It didn’t even attack me, but scanned me and I managed to get close enough to scan it too. Then it seemed to shift its attention to the debris field around us. I can’t quite tell if it was analysing it or picking up parts. And then, just like that, it left. I wonder if that human ship got blown up by Thargoids? Maybe this one was just a scavenger? Who knows.

25th June 3309 One of the many Pleiades Sector systems I’ve been visiting

Still hunting for whatever location those listening posts were referring to. Triangulating the data is difficult and time-consuming, I’m finding myself jumping and hoping for the best, knowing that I must be roughly in the right area. But I will get there.

HIP 17000 This system didn’t have the signal I was looking for, but do you know what I found? A black hole. Lined up with the nebula, it made for a pretty unique spectacle.

26th June 3309 HIP 16613

Finally found it. Approached the coordinates I had gathered from the listening posts. I almost turned around and left when I saw a shipwreck shrouded in a green cloud, but I didn’t go through all of this jumping around for nothing. Found out from the log uplink what happened to this young, overly confident pilot who thought it would be a good idea to try and shoot down a Thargoid vessel. It didn’t end well for him.

It didn’t end well for me, either.

First, I almost boosted into the planet upon approach, because my hand twitched when I wanted to switch fire groups and scan the wreck.

And then... a Thargoid showed up. I wanted to get closer and scan it, but I must have got too close. Suddenly, my shields were down. Less than 5 seconds later, before I even had time to try to boost away, my poor Elmwing’s hull cracked and the automated safety protocols were triggered. I woke up aboard a fleet carrier I had docked at earlier today. Good thing I had at least sold my biological samples!

[Once I had respawned, I flew back to the site and waited for the Thargoid to come back and just waved at it. We had a much friendlier, or at least, less hostile, interaction.]

There wasn’t much left for me to do there, and the escape pod I had picked up was lost with my ship... I can only hope it survived the explosion. Made my way to Taygeta. Picked up the signal of another black box. Dropped in and found myself face to face (sort of) with another Thargoid. A Cyclops, this time. Everything was going well, and then it felt like it was looking at me wrong, and those little drones around it started to gnaw on my hull. I hadn’t even turned my shields on! Thankfully, I was able to turn around, boost, pop a heat sink, boost away again, engage my FSD and escape with 62% hull. Phew!

There is another listening post here, with new coordinates.  Along with some high gravity bodies that I want to try to land on, just for the experience...

29th June 3309 HIP 17892

Travelled 20LY so I could be sure to sell my exploration data before attempting a high-G landing. Not that I had much to sell, after the incident with the Thargoid, but just to be safe. That's all I wanted to do here for now. Turns out, this system has two listening posts, unrelated to the one in Taygeta. So that's now 3 stories for me to follow, 3 mysteries to investigate... And who knows what else I'm going to find!

I was pleased to see Orchestration fundamentals covered in the lecture, as I like to treat many of the dynamic characteristics of my pad sounds (in electronic/EDM-based compositions) in a manner akin to how an orchestra would. However, as Nicole mentioned, the basics of orchestration are especially complex (which is why it is often outsourced, even by composers themselves). When combining electronic synthesisers with highly unique timbres can complicate the mix even further. Some synth sounds don't even have their own category (e.g. brass/pad/lead/strings, etc) and are what I like to refer to as "synth-isolates" – a completely unique sound that doesn't fit into conventional labelling.

References -

Week 6 covered an extensive range of compositional topics, from Wagnerian Leitmotifs to Japanese aesthetic principles. Although I am not well-versed in either of these concepts, two of the mentioned aesthetic principles piqued my interest. 1. Wabi-sabi – finding beauty in imperfection and impermanence. 2. Iki – sophisticated simplicity with a hint of sensuality. From a compositional perspective, this is something that I have been trying to adopt into my practice, particularly for drums and percussion. When I listen to other tracks, I notice a lot of subtle variation in the timing and velocity (something that my compositions lack). The concept of Wabi-Sabi's "imperfection" can be translated to a slight misalignment of MIDI information on the grid, enhancing the organic quality of a track. This reminded me of some of the discussions I've observed in the modern progressive metal scene, where people have noted that the instrumentation's technical complexity and musicians' virtuosity have reached a point where everything sounds too perfect. Now, imperfection has become a somewhat nostalgic quality that people reminisce about when discussing older recordings in these genres.

References -

(Beato 2021) - "The Modern Guitar Discussion w/ Tosin Abasi, Tim Henson & Misha Mansoor." https://youtu.be/6wb4AcfXSyo.

(Busque 2021) - "Perfection and Wabi-Sabi in music." [Blog]. Accessed 11/04/2025. https://www.mariabusque.net/en/blog/wabi-sabi.

Synthesising sounds that circumvent the main oscillators sparked a trend that continued into this week's creation of the green light throw. Applying effects to various white noises from the noise oscillator has been a foolproof way to create textures without distinct pitches.

I experimented a bit with modulating the distortion. Serum actually got me 90% of the way to the sound I was aiming for, but since I had success with bouncing the audio on the laser death sound, I applied the same concept here.

Light Ball Grabs

I was struggling to synthesise texture-based sounds (without pitch) from scratch. Feeling a bit short on ideas, I began tinkering with various effect plugins on bounced audio from unused sounds, which led me to rediscover a forgotten favourite of mine – Xynth Audios Rezonator. Resonators can produce similar effects to vocoders, except they alter audio more discretely by applying square or pulse waves to the harmonics of a sound. This technique found its way into many of the one-shots that I created this week, but some of my favourite ones were the white/green light ball grabs.

As I previously mentioned in the lecture entry last week, in the realm of sound design… The Ambience is not a strength of mine, so before I dove headfirst into Serum, I skimmed through the knytt underground video to see what background elements were present in each of the rooms. The trees and wind did not require extensive time or research since white noise is the primary timbre of these sounds. However, synthesising realistic water with a virtual synthesiser was an entirely different challenge until I stumbled upon a tutorial by Naircol. He demonstrated the power of applying randomised "chaos" parameters to a bandpass filter and coarse pitch on a saw wave. Although my synth patch lacked the same level of intricacy as Naircol's patch, I still managed to create something that partially resembled the textures of running water.

References

(Duda 2014) - Serum 1.351 (VST Plugin). Xfer Records.

(Naircol. 2022) - "Glitchy WATER FX with Serum!" YouTube. https://youtu.be/cftgSTQfq1g.

(Synth Anatomy 2022) - Xynth Audio Rezonator, new resonator plugin for creating rich harmonies. Accessed 21/03/2025.