David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #27 (May 2025)

Posted 2025-05-10 under #dispatch

Pollen season is over. Bamboo killing season is here. Lots to cover this month. Let’s go. Just got back from a week-long company gathering, starting in Falls Church, VA near where I grew up and heading up to River Mountain. Great to see everyone in person (and catch up with a few of my favorite former coworkers). Major thanks to my parents for taking care of the kids and animals (and also for coming down to help out while Claire took a staycation at a loft downtown).

Nico is on the go, crawling, pulling up, spreading cheer wherever he goes. We got him out on the bike, into the foam pit at our local trampoline park, and to his first baseball game at the old Bulls stadium.

We took the family to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, VA to meet Jon and Blitz from Dino Ranch. I went there a lot as a kid but haven’t been in a good 30 years, so everything’s about a third smaller than I remembered. A bunch of the drive followed the Virginia Capital Trail, something I’d like to bike someday. On the way out, Claire noticed a large nail sticking out of our tire, so we had to cruise home at 50 MPH on the little spare.

We went down to Lake Norman for Easter weekend, and I brought a music rig consisting of my MIDI controller + iPad + portable speaker (with this hub to connect them). I had a blast jamming with Claire’s family. I love Neo-Soul Keys for classic electric piano sounds and Zeeon for bass and leads. I brought it to my work event as well – here’s a little video.

Nev and I have been enjoying ChatGPT’s new image features. We generated a whole coloring book of her in the world of Dino Ranch, then had it make a concept image of a 3D model of her riding Tango the Triceratops I was able to feed into Meshy to get an STL file. I then used Craftcloud to order some prints, which were well received but of course necessitated similar prints for Blitz and Clover (I was happy to oblige). At this point I’ve spent like half the cost of a nice resin printer, something I’m strongly considering.

I finally signed up for Melodics to get better at finger drumming. I can plug my sampler into my iPad and use it to play increasingly complex beats. It gets pretty challenging but it’s been a great way to learn traditional drum stuff (kick + snare + hat patterns) as well as bass lines and sample flips.

This Month

• Adventure: something fun with Nev while Claire takes Nico on a girls/babies trip (camping?); back to the lake for Memorial Day
• Project: make a track with my sampler + minimal quantization (and that crochet fox of course)
• Skill: more finger drumming with Melodics

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: Zeroes, Chuck Wendig
• Non-fiction: The Notebook, Roland Allen
• Music: Twoism, Boards of Canada

Links

• AI ambivalence

  I don’t have a conclusion. Really, that’s my current state: ambivalence. I acknowledge that these tools are incredibly powerful, I’ve even started incorporating them into my work in certain limited ways (low-stakes code like POCs and unit tests seem like an ideal use case), but I absolutely hate them. I hate the way they’ve taken over the software industry, I hate how they make me feel while I’m using them, and I hate the human-intelligence-insulting postulation that a glorified Excel spreadsheet can do what I can but better.

• No Happy Nonsense

  Hi, my name is Mike V. I write things and post them here.

• Tomorrow might feel better - annie’s blog

  Anyway a good rule I read somewhere long ago is something like Never trust how you feel about your life after 9pm.

• The Business of Empathy — The CEO of Kobo believes books can save us

  Rakuten Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn believes that in an age of fragmented attention, books remain the deepest form of human connection.

• Life Cannot Be Delegated - by L. M. Sacasas

  Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick—don’t let yourself think these are distracting you from your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our ‘practice’ which will put us on a ‘path’—it is our path.

• Re-sourcing the Mind - by L. M. Sacasas

  My contention, then, is that when we are confronted with the opportunity to outsource the labor of articulation, we will find that possibility more tempting to the degree that we experience a sense of incompetency and inadequacy, a sense which may have many sources, not least among which is the failure to stock our mind, heart, and imagination.

• AI as Self-Erasure

  As the father sits with pen and paper, he strives to encompass in words the elusive truth of his daughter, as seen from the unique vantage of a father, in a way fitting for this pivotal moment in the progression of her life. He may find that through the effort of articulating this relationship, it is more fully revealed to him. As Taylor says, the “right word” discloses, “brings the phenomenon properly into view for the first time. Discovery and invention are two sides of the same coin; we devise an expression which allows what we are striving to encompass to appear.”

• Presets & Originality

  To conclude from the outset, while I am involved in creating presets for commercial products, as a composer, I also use presets crafted by other sound designers without any modification. This choice is guided by a distinct aesthetic sensibility. In this essay, I aim to explore how presets are perceived from various perspectives, incorporating examples from 20th-century art, and propose an approach to them from a composer’s standpoint.

• The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes - The New York Times

  That is what I want to say every time someone asks me, “What about A.I.?” with the breathless anticipation of a boy who thinks this is the summer he finally gets to touch a boob. I’m far from a Luddite. It is precisely because I use new technology that I know mid when I see it.