David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #28 (June 2025)

Posted 2025-06-05 under #dispatch

Bamboo killing season is over, now we’re onto goddamn cockroach season. I’ve lived in the South for a quarter century and those little monsters still freak me out. We went down to Lake Norman for Memorial Day weekend, spent a bunch of time on the new (to us) pontoon boat. So much fun. The kids loved it, and I look forward to many more years with them out on the water.

Here’s some new music:

Not thrilled with the final result here but this does feel like progress: I used different drum samples than usual, which give a less techno, more lo-fi feel, and I designed both bass patches myself rather than just flipping through presets until I found something workable.

My laptop crapped out on the last week of a big project at work. I was able to cobble together a setup using an old ThinkPad for coding + my iPad for everything else; an iPad with an external monitor and Stage Manager is pretty slick. Then I was able to grab a spare from work and restore everything from Time Machine. I spend a lot of time thinking about backups I never wind up using, so this was a nice reminder that keeping a few different backups – one you can access from any device, one you can use for a full system restore – is worth the time and expense. The project launched successfully. I’ll post a link once it’s ready for the public.

Busy June ahead of us: Nico turns one in a few days (man time flies), then we’re off to the beach with Claire’s family, then I’m headed to the Eastern Shore to hang with a buddy of mine and make some synth jams.

Finally, I’ve been following the Tottenham Hotspur football club for ten years. I was just about ready to give up on them, between not having time to watch a lot of matches and the terrible vibes this season. This piece felt pretty targeted. Then they went and won the Europa cup, their first silverware in 17 years and the third-coolest thing you can win in a season. Let’s hope they keep Ange around.

This Month

• Adventure: Holden Beach, Eastern Shore
• Project: music in Eastern Short; might try OpenAI Codex to build a 3D web toy; might even try surgery on my old laptop to see if I can get it working again
• Skill: the usual music production stuff; really looking forward to picking up some new skills (synthesis, Ableton)

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: Invasive, Chuck Wendig
• Non-fiction: The Notebook, Roland Allen
• Music: Trans Pacific, Gas Lab & Kazumi Kaneda

Links

• There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness

  I thought of the love I felt for the unborn little thing within me — just then, just beginning to make its presence known with a kick and flutter and a flip — and I felt bowled over by all that I had not understood. The love my parents had felt, do feel, that I had recognized in the abstract, I had so often overlooked.

• Searls of Wisdom for April 2025

  Planet Earth is undeniably a bit of a shitshow at the moment, but I’m actually feeling optimistic that we’re approaching the precipice of something that will—once we get to the other side of it—feel like the beginning of a sea change in how information is organized, constituted, and distributed. To wit: skepticism of information technology has materialized and matured from opposite ends of the political spectrum, and advocates from both sides are meeting in the middle with relatively boring policy prescriptions like regulating the use of smartphones in schools and expanding the scope of antitrust actions. Seems… fine, actually?

• Navigating by aliveness

  And if in a year or two or ten the paragraphs above look hopelessly naïve … well, I think I’ll be glad to have been naïve, in this context. Because I suspect that a certain form of naivete may be a precondition for aliveness.

• Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

  “Do you know there’s a section of our customer base that buys a fresh Moleskine every time they come into a store? We have no idea what they do with them”

• Junk Contemplations

  All of these things hurt my eyes, even though this has more or less been the state of stuff in our home for the past two years. I just can’t get used to it, something keeps on urging me to clean up, and I indeed have the feeling that that is exactly what I do all day long every single day—without much success.

• How to think

  I expect that when, and if, the AI revolution arrives, people who have the ability to think are the ones who will not be left behind. Thinkers will be the ones who will thrive in these uncertain times.