VirtualWolf @virtualwolf@aus.social

And the rest.

We had a paid-for-by-work lunch at this restaurant in Surry Hills called Chin Chin, and oh my god it was AMAZING. We got the set menu because there were nine of us, and it was all dishes to share. I missed taking a photo of one of the dishes (the fried squid with nahn jim), but the absolute highlight was the hot and sour brussels sprouts with mint and red chilli, holy shit they were incredible.

We've got a thunderstorm and also hail happening right now, and Beanie does NOT like it.

I might be overthinking this. (Though to be fair I've never used anything but Vallejo's black and white primer paints so I had no idea what the new ones would look like.)

In the office for Kill Team tonight! I didn't actually play this game, merely spectated, but it was using the new Into The Dark terrain and missions that were released recently, and it's pretty excellent.

You can always tell when Beanie's had a particularly good walk.

Woohoo, my airbrush paints arrived! Now to hopefully not fuck it up while I'm using them to paint my Kill Team terrain...

We heard a noise, looked over, and Beanie had made himself completely comfortable on Kristina's jeans.

It's been quite a while but we played some more Warhammer Underworlds tonight! The Crimson Court (vampires) versus Myari's Purifiers (elves), I played the vampires which I realised I hadn't actually played before, and won 10-5 despite a very poor start.

We've had a tin of black beans sitting in the cupboard for like a year, because Kristina can't eat them anymore. Finally got around to using them and I made a batch of Spanish rice with them and chorizo to have during the week, and it is gooood.

I know I said this before but MAN this delay pedal is fun! Have a listen to this, I'm just playing quarter notes but the pedal adds so much extra rhythm. (The drums aren't me, I just chucked a drummer track in in Logic Pro.)

There's a very angry patch of thunderstorm rapidly approaching so Beanie is insisting I sit on the floor with him.

The setup is complete! ...at least until my new guitar arrives, and also until I inevitably decide I want more guitar pedals and thus need to build a longer pedalboard. 😅

Man, that delay pedal is such fun. If you set one single repeat and set the delay before the repeat occurs to the right timing, you can get it to essentially play notes in between what you're playing, so it sounds like you're playing more. Or you can set a really long delay with lots of repeats and lower the intensity, and it sounds like you're in a vast hall. Or you can go in between those and just get a much fatter-sounding tone.

Yesssss, very excited to play around with this tonight!

No photo of the food because I forgot, and no photo of the nice night skyline because the train was at the station when we got there, but we were at Mamak to meet up with a friend we hadn't seen for ages and their as-yet-unmet significant other and it was excellent. So have this photo of the inside of the train instead. 😅

Huzzah, the relay interface finally arrived!

Next step, figuring out how best to configure the MIDI controller to activate the interface in terms of ease of usage...

Okay, so after a TON of reading and watching videos on YouTube (shout-out to That Pedal Show in particular), I've decided the last (for the moment 😏) piece of my guitar pedal board is going to be a Boss DM-2W analogue delay pedal. Delay pedals basically take the note you play and repeat it back after a given interval and for a certain number of repeats, and there's all SORTS of interesting effects you can get depending on how big the interval is, how much of the original note you get back, and how many repeats you've set. Analogue pedals in particular have a specific sound that's really warm and dark, as opposed to digital pedals which tend to be basically exact replicas of your sound. The original DM-2 pedal stopped being produced in the mid-80s and this DM-2W is the "Waza Craft" reissue of that original one, so it's got the same sound but also a little switch at the top that goes between "Standard" DM-2 and the new "Custom" mode that boosts the maximum repeat rate from 300ms to 800ms and brightens up the sound a little bit.

I did some playing around in Logic Pro with the built-in delays in there, none of which sound nearly as good as the DM-2W, but damn, playing without any sort of delay at all sounds so flat and boring now, haha. I was considering the Boss DD-200 which is VERY swish, but it's a digital one instead of analogue and while it's got a ton of features, it seems kind of overwhelming for just dipping my toes into the world of delay.

Beanie's new favourite thing is to very carefully manoeuvre his blanket to be exactly in the doorway and then plonk himself down on it.

We took advantage of the GLORIOUS weather today and went for a walk around Fagan Park. You seriously couldn't have asked for a nicer day.

I don't think you can tell from the photo, but there's a good three or four bees buzzing around our lavender at the moment!

Now, hopefully these lavenders don't randomly up and die like the last two lots did (granted the previous ones were in the ground and the soil is CRAZY thick with clay here, so I think that significantly contributed to their demise).