personal site of artist, composer, and technologist Matthew Lyon
You’re given a car, and it’s time to learn to drive. You’re passingly familiar with how cars work, and you’ve got an instructor on speakerphone conference call: “Ok, let’s get started! Literally. Hold down the left pedal – the brake, and turn the ignition. Keep your foot on the brake.” You do this, and the car starts. “Find the transmission control, typically a big stick next to the seat, or…
B-Rhymes A rhyming dictionary for when you’re not particularly set on finding an exact rhyme for a word. The case of the 500-mile email Another oldie but goodie, in case you haven’t seen it: I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. “We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.” “What’s the…
Amina al-Sirafi is a pirate nakhudha of enough renown that she’s retired, living a quiet life on a secluded coast with her mother and her daughter, hiding from those who seek revenge; though it seems her adventures are far from over. “Amina al-Sirafi” is also the series title given to the two historical fantasy-fiction books so far written by Shannon Chakraborty , The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi…
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I have both been busy, and finding a lot of stuff that’s crossed my plate either not worth sharing, or more of something I’m sick of talking about , however good it may be. Tube Archivist This has been a great tool for our NAS for a number of reasons, but perhaps the best one is that it gets away from Youtube’s distraction infrastructure. Why you…
I Who Have Never Known Men is a short novel originally published in French in 1995 by Belgian author by Jacqueline Harpman ; it is the first of her books translated to English, originally published as such under the title The Mistress of Silence . The premise is simple, and – aside from some small points in the beginning – I feel like you could flip the genders of the characters and tell a very…
Music Credits Matthew Lyon : synthesizers & programming; writing & production. Play Hooky : Album artwork. Notes This is actually my second commissioned game soundtrack, but the first one is still pending the game’s release; I also did the game’s sound effects. Through some iterative discovery, we settled on a mostly sampled acoustic palette, though there is a fair amount of synthesis…
I recently re-read Reviewing Ratings with the intent of updating a bit, and this concluding idea stuck out to me: I’m hoping we can see a resurgence of curated recommendation lists. I’ve been doing this for more specialized things with my Links and Book Recommendations series, but figured it’s worth establishing a place for more general recommendations, and thus, a new page. I like supporting…
There Is No Antimemetics Division is a science-fiction horror novel originally published serially on the alternate-reality fiction site SCP Foundation by British author Sam Hughes under the pen name qntm , self-published in both e-book and print form under a Creative Commons license (version 1), and then reworked for broader publication by Penguin Random House books (version 2). It is among the…
In learning audio engineering, a common piece of advice is to listen to your works-in-progress in the car. Nominally, this is because your car’s stereo probably isn’t going to sound as nice as your fancy studio monitors , and you’ll notice a lot of problems on those that you wouldn’t on the nice speakers. But there’s something else: when you’re working in your studio on those nice speakers, you’re…
on the scorption and frog on tumblr, of all places, several iterations of the scorpion and the frog parable, which go to some unexpected places: The frog paused in the middle of the river, treading water. “So, I suppose we’re at an impasse.” The river rushed around them. The scorpion’s stinger twitched against the frog’s unbroken skin. “I suppose so,” the scorpion said. Shigeru Miyamoto x…
Zen fascists will control you… An essay that touches on both the granola-to-fascist pipeline that we saw emerge during early COVID, the self-help complex, and the nature of therapy. This is a hard one to summarize, but I think its lead-in sells it: In 1979, a punk band from San Francisco recorded a song about the Governor of California. It was a joke, mostly. Jerry Brown was a Democrat, a…
Some years ago I had an interaction with my manager that went like this: manager> Hey, there’s something wrong with the numbers coming out of your metrics system? me> unlikely, but not impossible – what’s up? manager> I’m looking at this report – all of the averages by category are correct, but the averages for the total are wrong – here, check this out [screenshot of a PDF produced by another…
How to grow strawberries From Mike Montiero , author of Ruined by Design , some advice for someone new in their career and recently laid off from their tech job: If you decide to persevere in this industry, I’d walk into every interview with your head held high and remember that you are interviewing them, as much as they are interviewing you. You are deciding whether this is a company you want to…
Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer From IEEE Spectrum , a wonderful piece which touches on a lot of my interests at once: Hendrix’s mission was to reshape both the electric guitar’s envelope and its tone until it could feel like a human voice. He tackled the guitar’s constraints by augmenting it. His solution was essentially a modular analog signal chain driven not by knobs but by hands, feet,…
Discworld is a sprawling series consisting of 41 novels (that are considered mostly stand-alone) with many adaptations and an assortment of companion books and board games , set on a world that is a flat disc on the back of four giant elephants, themselves on the back of the giant turtle Atuin, journeying through space. But that doesn’t matter: while the books are fantasy, when it is good, the…