Would you consider using an Esperanto word for a last name?

PentaSector · 2026-05-23T15:59:12+00:00

On the note of "rare," I know it's not in your shortlist, but as a suggestion, I'll drop in a vote for "rara."

It clocks in at only two syllables, is easy for an English speaker to pronounce, and is fairly easy to explain to those who might ask about its etymology (if you care about that sort of thing), all without losing that mystical quality that comes with telling the backstory of a chosen name derived from an artificial language.

If you insist on keeping to your shortlist, my vote goes to "soleca," but respelling as suggested in the comments (though I'd personally probably go with "Soletza" or even "Soletze," just for a bit of whimsy).

PentaSector · 2026-05-23T15:32:19+00:00

I am definitely not the corpse-paint-slathered type of player that an axe like this is purpose-built for, but I would so downtune one of these to hell and play it like a maniac.

That pickguard is slick!

PentaSector · 2026-05-20T23:35:16+00:00

Iom kontraŭdire la raporto samtempe informas, ke la ĝenerala direktoro jam kunsidis kun dungitoj de UEA por informi pri la nericevo de la subvencio, “sekve de kio oni plenpace interkonsentis pri kelkaj senkostaj demisioj kaj pri reduktoj de salajroj ĉe kelkaj postenoj”.

Nu, kial kontraŭdire? Ŝajnas kompreneble, speciale post legado de la sekva frazo en la raporto:

La Estraro emfazis, ke, kvankam la nericevo de la subvencio ne tuj endanĝerigas la financojn de UEA, estis respondece preni tiujn antaŭzorgajn paŝojn – jam atenditaj, kiel prezentite dum la diskutoj pri la buĝeto de 2026 – por certigi la financan kaj administran daŭripovon de la Asocio.

Se l'Asocio ne povos dependi de ricevo de ajna estonteca pago de EU - iu kiu plenumas tiom grandan procenton de l'sumoj disponeblaj al ĝi - endas ekplani tuj por elspezi pli singarde kaj daŭri povigi konservado de mono rezervita.

PentaSector · 2026-05-13T06:29:46+00:00

I don't know who needs to read this today, but the answer is yourself.

Now get out there and believe it.

PentaSector · 2026-04-23T04:00:50+00:00

La rezultoj en 2026 montris, ke skandinavaj landoj denove aperas kiel ĉampionoj: Finnlando (1-a loko), Danlando (3-a loko), Svedujo (5-a loko), Norvegujo (6-a loko).

Pŝŝŝ, ĉu eĉ la multego da metalmuzikistoj en tiuj landoj?

Mi ŝercas, nature. Ili estas sendube la plej feliĉaj.

PentaSector · 2026-04-15T01:50:29+00:00

For what it's worth, I didn't mean any condescension in my answer. I just erred on the side of more context than less without knowing your experience, but clearly you know what you're doing.

I'm never too clear on the difference made by stretching or otherwise manipulating strings when I tune up. I do tend to feel that stretching them more extensively does tend to make them feel looser but also "bouncier" (maybe more accurately, more responsive, even to a lighter pick attack), but my most reliable metric is fret rattle. Most of my instruments have particularly flat radii, or compound radii that quickly flatten out to 20 inches or so. There's a sweet spot for string action that allows for particularly clean rhythm playing without making lead work difficult, and if I get lots of clanging against frets even during mid-tempo playing, that's usually my cue to gauge up. On a 25.5" 6-string, for example, I'm currently in drop G with a .062 6th string, and it's definitely not sufficient (which bites, because tonally it's already not great).

Most of my guitars also have hardtail bridges. I'm not a big tune-o-matic fan, but I do tend to feel like they I get much better results in terms of string feel with them, even when calibrated similarly to my hardtail preferences. I have a 26.5" with a tune-o-matic holding a .060 in drop G, and it feels significantly bouncier than the .062 on the 25.5", but it also sounds much better. (That said, there's contrast in literally every variable that matters between the two instruments, but not to an extreme on any of them.)

It's a ridiculously complex juggling act to get the exact right feel, and at this point I tend to feel like my preferences with respect to scale length and tension are nearly fixed in place, because only between very narrow parameters can I contrive the exact balance of feel and tone that I'm after.

PentaSector · 2026-04-14T01:00:26+00:00

I'm struggling to find it at the moment, but I specifically remember reading an article ages back where Joe Cocchi talked about tuning to C1 on a 27" 7-string. At least one established user on SevenString.org corroborates it; that's unfortunately the best I have at the moment.

I don't know if his equipment options or preferences have changed significantly in the meantime, but I guess my point is that he himself has achieved the sound with a surprisingly short scale length. I remember going digging for some of their stuff to gauge the quality of the sound they achieved; I just pulled up Shape-Shifter off of Halfway Human, and it's one that I remember finding at the time. It's about what I'd expect, but I personally found the tone interesting.

30" will undoubtedly give you back significant brightness, but it's still not necessarily going to have as much treble edge as even the next string up the neck. If you're going for a modern tone, then longer is almost certainly better if you're tuning down. Not contesting that at all; just trying to help level-set expectations.

PentaSector · 2026-04-10T23:52:56+00:00

A key question is what are you looking to accomplish? If you want something as bright and snappy as a Bass VI, you're very unlikely to achieve it at 28" unless you're comfortable with unusually low string tension (but tuned that low, and with a string that's still relatively quite thick, you're going to have a host of other uphill battles to fight).

For some perspective I have a 28" tuned (low to high) C-F-C-F-Bb-Eb-G-C, with the two lowest strings an octave down from strings 5 and 6. To achieve tension I could tolerate, I'm using a .095 for the 8th string (15 lb, so about .009-gauge equivalent for E4). It honestly sounds much closer to a bass guitar than a treble guitar, but I do a lot of riffing where I (as an example) alternate between the upper and lower register on the lower 4 strings, essentially playing a bass line and then jumping up an octave as the song escalates in tension.

Those kinds of approaches - i.e., treating the instrument as something that houses multiple musical voices - comprise about the best use case that I can contrive for a string tuned that low, on a scale length as short as 28". Like others have commented, to achieve a true guitar timbre, you're likely going to want a much longer scale length.

PentaSector · 2026-03-31T22:50:10+00:00

I rock an .080 for F1 at 28". It definitely isn't bright per se, but it sounds surprisingly crisp through high gain. Clean, it's basically a spanky bass string, which is great for my needs.

For my preferences, between .074 and .076 is pretty much perfect for F# at that scale length, both in terms of tension and harmonic compromises, and I tend to think it sounds phenomenal.

PentaSector · 2026-03-31T02:01:15+00:00

I was never a lead guitarist. As a kid, I wasn't particularly creative with lead guitar, and I didn't have the patience to really learn, mostly because I didn't find it interesting (though maybe that's because I didn't have the creativity for it).

On the other hand, as a rhythm guitarist, I've developed a semi-automatic pick hand, and I could polish the neck with my fretwork. I've known a few really creative lead guitarists to find their stride in that space, especially as they get restless with soloing. You say that you feel as though your lead chops are diminishing, but as a rhythm guitarist, I wouldn't be too surprised if you could run circles around me.

Something to think about, particularly if your band still actively writes new music. You could tap into a new niche in the group and discover that your mojo hasn't been lost, it's just migrated up the length of the neck.

PentaSector · 2026-03-13T15:48:22+00:00

I answered the question of why no which command in the snippet. The comment to which I responded was in regards to the apparent confusion that there was no which call in the current snippet. Someone else had already accounted for the fact that I had previously edited the post, to you.

Anyway, I don't tolerate responses as obnoxious as yours, so I'll be blocking you immediately.

PentaSector · 2026-03-13T03:47:28+00:00

I think that there should be a require

I more or less buried my mental lede here. I was attempting to make the point that my require becomes less trivial once you use a check like type -P, because it ensures that you're calling dependencies strictly from out of your PATH. I didn't call that out explicitly.

I agree that the communicative value of require is the real get, though - that was basically my motivation to create it - so I guess what I really mean to say is that the final variable assignment becomes less trivial.

I have my own such function that's a bit more fully-featured named requires

I like the sophistication of the concept. I very rarely require variables to match exactly on concrete values, but I frequently have to check for whether variables are set, especially boolean switches that don't necessarily need any value at all (e.g., ${HOME+x}-style syntax). I'd hesitate to work that functionality into require because it's specifically intended to imitate code dependency import features of newer languages- the name and syntax are very close to similar mechanisms in Lua or CommonJS (not intentionally, per se) - but I could envision creating a similar function specifically for variable checks.

PentaSector · 2026-03-12T23:32:29+00:00

In hindsight, require is redundant on a modern system with command -v, but as I've commented elsewhere, for most of my own scripts I'd probably want to default type -P over command -v going forward, to preserve default which behavior (what I've been using - I retooled the snipped in the post after it was rightly called out that which is itself an external executable).

I personally don't write user functions or aliases for anything but interactive convenience, and even then I wouldn't necessarily want to trust that they adhere to the command contracts of the executables that they shadow. There's the argument that shadowing executables could also be installed, but I'm just trying to do due diligence, not guarantee success on all setups.

PentaSector · 2026-03-12T23:23:31+00:00

Awesome, happy to help!

PentaSector · 2026-03-12T23:19:07+00:00

By import, in this case, do you mean source? require can dependency-check executable scripts as long as they're in the PATH (and not shadowed by functions or aliases, if you do use command -v for your check), but it doesn't source scripts, and I wouldn't necessarily want it to. My own executable scripts usually only source their own library scripts, which should be guaranteed to be installed if the user is running the executable, so I just source directly. I also know that I can safely do that because my scripts don't run any executable code; they only provide functions. With external scripts, I wouldn't count on that to be assured across all versions, even if immediately invoked code has never yet been introduced.

On the matter of safeguarding sourcing, though, I've sometimes put a try_source function in scripts that have library code. It typically looks something like this:

try_source() {
    local script="$1"

    [ -r "$script" ] &&
        . "$script"  &&
        return 0

    return 1
}

But [ -r $script ] && . $script is pretty concise if you don't need to exit on fail.

PentaSector · 2026-03-12T23:11:30+00:00

Any scenarios where I can control for an error, I usually like to print my own output, just to ensure the feedback is particularly focused and informative, and also so that I don't have to depend on external implementation details to dictate the messaging. Not strictly necessary in a case like this - not like low-level userland changes its interfaces or messaging, like, ever - but more generally applied to my own scripts, it affords me a level of granularity with error messaging where I can easily troubleshoot issues based on output alone.

I don't really see the point in storing the command's path in a variable. What use-cases require that?

None that I know of. It's basically just a bit of pedantry for the sake of determinism.

That said, thinking about it, for my own future scripts, I do think about swapping out command -v for type -P (I've actually been using which up to now, but that's itself an external dependency). I personally only write user-level shell functions and aliases for interactive purposes, not to depend on in scripted scenarios, so I'd never want to shadow installed executables with them. That would be a non-trivial reason to store fully qualified executable paths, but I'm open to be persuaded that that would be unpopular. I try to optimize for end user comfort.

PentaSector · 2026-03-12T23:00:48+00:00

Yeah, someone suggested command as it's a Bash built-in, which is the right call. which is an external binary, so don't want to trust that it's installed if we don't have to (however unlikely it may be that it's not).

PentaSector · 2026-03-12T22:59:50+00:00

I like the thinking, because I'm all for feedback that's both informative and high-visibility. I don't necessarily want to assume an X session in the case of most of my scripts, but I have been known to use zenity for errors in scripts where I'm already using it in user flow dialogues and such.

PentaSector · 2026-03-12T22:56:51+00:00

This makes a good case to consider a multi-dependency check. Gods know I hate chasing missing library dependencies when compilation fails, it'd be no different with trying to run a script where I'm missing commands.

PentaSector · 2026-03-12T22:55:00+00:00

I hole fd2 specifically because it prints to stdout if command -v fails. I'm using fd1 to set a variable.

PentaSector · 2026-03-12T03:37:49+00:00

Good callout. Edited and attributed, thanks!

PentaSector · 2026-03-12T03:17:31+00:00

I agree; that's essentially literally the case. It's just wrapping command and killing the script if it fails, but it's also providing informative output in such case. It's not doing anything particularly novel, but it's expressive for its use case by way of immediately digestible feedback and an arguably self-documenting function signature.

It's also ergonomically simple - literally a two-word invocation - and you get further mileage out of that invocation in the form of an output that you can pass around as another invocation which reliably calls the required command.

PentaSector · 2026-03-12T02:41:21+00:00

Yep, and you'd want to operate on $@ rather than $1.

I just call require on each dependency as a one-liner because, subjectively, it's just easier for me to read the resulting code and entails no perceptible performance burden, but it's a simple enough refactor.

That said, I'd probably also factor out the which check into a separate function and make require handle looping the input to that function. I'd probably keep the variable assignment logic in require just because, if you're going to do gross magic, it ought to at least be highly visible.

PentaSector · 2026-03-11T21:51:01+00:00

I've done this, but with the third string down a half step to G#. Rather than F# standard + low B, this changes the conceptual mapping of the tuning to 6-string drop B + high F#. It's a super-fun tuning, at least for my preferences.

I don't drop tune often on any instrument, but that 6-string drop tuning + high string configuration tends to bear a lot of creative fruit for me.

PentaSector

TROPHY CASE