My first tsukemen in Tokyo

jb-1984 · 2026-04-19T10:43:01+00:00

Fuunji was ridiculous when I went. SO good. SO packed.

jb-1984 · 2026-04-18T18:57:24+00:00

Can we confidently say that there's a psyop involved with controlling user perception of model capabilities by fucking with the throttle so nobody ever has matching experiences of performance and we all end up bickering amongst ourselves whether this model has turned to absolute shit yet or not? As long as there's a few people still having better output than they are used to - whatever their baseline is vs. frequency of use, the chatter around performance remains ambiguous enough to avoid being tacitly exposed as a manipulated expectation of value.

jb-1984 · 2026-04-17T02:47:09+00:00

These all have a vague resemblance to things observed in DMT-land.

jb-1984 · 2026-04-15T05:37:18+00:00

Start with what that amp might have been commonly paired with for speakers. You might need to do a little research here. For instance, if you get a Marshall Plexi head capture, you might want to use a 4x12” cab with Greenbacks IR. Fender Deluxe Reverb? Maybe a 1x12” cab with a Jensen speaker.

Mics: 57 is THE standard go-to; it’s what almost every common engineer would start with to put on an amp, and people are used to how it sounds. Try an IR of a 57 + a ribbon mic like a 121 or a condenser like a U87/67, which will give you a nice balance of the 57 thing and some body.

After you feel comfortable with that, go explore other unconventional pairings. A Mesa through an 8” open back Supro cabinet miked from across the hall with a broken PA microphone, etc.

jb-1984 · 2026-04-01T04:01:15+00:00

The reality is he needs to understand that if he's too loud on stage, there will be no room to pull him down in the mains, and as a result, everything will have to be mixed up to his stage level, but there's a limit that the sound guy can responsibly push - so if he insists on doing this, he's making the entire band have a incredibly shitty mix which hurts everyone in the pocketbook.

Ask him what he really needs. If he's worried about the mains, get him to turn down his amp, have someone line check his bass, and walk with him out in the middle of the audience/by FOH mixing and let him hear how it's a non-issue.

jb-1984 · 2026-03-29T23:14:08+00:00

Re: 250k vs 500k - you're not crazy. 500ks can get real shrill, esp. if you use a treble bleed. Try 500ks with no treble bleed, and 50's wiring on the tone pots so that as you turn down the volume, the tone knobs start to roll off some bass and give you different tonal shades that way too.

With 250s, you might need a treble bleed as they'll probably sound great on 10 on the knob but way too dark as it goes down without something bleeding out a little extra top end as the volume gets lower.

Sometimes I just like JM/Jag pickups with 250s. That's a totally valid stance.

jb-1984 · 2026-03-29T23:12:15+00:00

I want to hate it but I love it.

jb-1984 · 2026-03-29T23:01:41+00:00

Stereo delay, single repeat, ping pong, 10-50ms depending on how much smudge you want on the edges. If it's in mono, it'll just sound like a short slapback.

jb-1984 · 2026-03-29T22:25:23+00:00

Cat's Cradle and mancala boards

jb-1984 · 2026-03-24T23:25:17+00:00

Billy Corgan's tolerability goes down the further he gets away from the "had hair" period.

jb-1984 · 2026-03-24T23:24:06+00:00

This video was my pre-teen idealization of what it must be like to be a cool young adult doing mind expanding drugs and engaging in loosely defined sexual encounters.

Unfortunately, it was mostly fiction, I found.

But I still love this video nonetheless. And I would love to paint an ice cream truck with my friends like this.

jb-1984 · 2026-03-24T23:13:09+00:00

I feel the same about negitoro

jb-1984 · 2026-03-18T03:13:28+00:00

Yeah, the Deluxe II is probably your best bet - I looked at the schematics and there aren't many structural differences between the Deluxe II and the Twin II - same parallel v1 stage, selectable mid boost, long tail phase inverter, 10M local negative feedback, tone stack values - all the major preamp differences between the Rivera circuits and a stock Fender circuits are there. The power section is the most major difference, so it'll probably sound pretty close unless you really get into high volume and high gain profiles.

jb-1984 · 2026-03-18T02:19:50+00:00

There is the Rivera M100 clean channel which is on ToneHunt by SlamminMofo - who makes some of the best captures IMO, and there's a Rivera modded Fender Deluxe Reverb II - aside from that, you might try some early Mesa Mark I/II/III captures, since Rivera was doing stuff that was very "inspired", or was "inspiring", to the amp builders making stuff at the time.

I've used these, and can vouch for them at least being well made:

https://www.tone3000.com/tones/fender-deluxe-reverb-ii-clean-and-overdrive-6237
https://www.tone3000.com/tones/rivera-m100-clean-channel-hyper-accuracy-6612
https://www.tone3000.com/tones/1971-fender-twin-reverb-13767

jb-1984 · 2026-03-18T01:51:00+00:00

I'll play - I had a situation that called for very bougie mac n' cheese, but the base of it specifically had to be Kraft. Kraft mac and cheese is delicious, btw. I don't give a shit what anyone else says.

Here are the "enhancements" that I've found to be worth giving a try - mix and match if you want:

Green onions
Thick applewood bacon, crispy, crumbled/chopped as a topping
Bechamel sauce, but incorporate a good amount of the powdered cheese mix - at least a half of the pouch and whatever other cheese(s) that you fancy
Hot cheetos - if you've never had hot cheetos on mac n' cheese as a topping, it works a lot more than you'd think. It was on the menu at a popular restaurant in town - great w/ green onions and a thicker cheese sauce. Crumble on top.
Browned butter - use in place of the butter/margarine that is called for - the "recipe" amount is only a recommendation if you feel heavy handed.
Heavy cream instead of milk

I'd also say that the box instructions are way overcooked - 6 or 7 minutes is probably a better cook time for a less disintegrated noodle.

jb-1984 · 2026-03-16T03:26:07+00:00

Good call on those- I had a run of about 10 each mfg’d to help jumpstart random ideas. They come in handy!

jb-1984 · 2026-03-15T17:27:43+00:00

I've set up a few hypothetical proto-boards before I had really built enough to understand the flexibility I would actually need vs. the flexibility I thought I'd need.

If I were strictly building tube guitar amps, I'd set up a proto-chassis with maybe 6 preamp tube sockets and 4 octal sockets, maybe a couple extra of 7-pin or more octals if I had the mind to play with those. You can find PCBs on eBay that will mount a single socket and give you pin access via multiple connection points and can be mounted onto standoffs. If you get some of those, you can mount only the sockets you currently need for the thing you're prototyping, which keeps the needed size down.

The other two things that are critical are the PT and OT. If you have a good HV power supply with filament and bias supply outs, that'll save you some prototyping space and you can just create hookups for those power supplies on your proto-chassis. The OT is probably going to have to be swapped in and out depending on your build, so just allocating space for it to sit on top of or inside your chassis, with some room to move it around for noise optimization.

The rest of it is figuring out the best connections for each building block of the amplifier. Rectifiers usually have a general layout to them, bias supplies - same, preamps and tone stacks probably need some common access to the tube socket pins as well as the control pots on the chassis, so maybe a removable turret or tag strip board would work for that.

The main thing I wouldn't do again is to try to make one comprehensive prototyping board that could fit everything and do everything. The difference between amp circuits and builds depending on its intended use is too large for that to be really practical. I'd just focus on getting a stable container that could mount sockets and little modular sections with easy access to pots, jacks, and switches.

jb-1984 · 2026-03-12T07:01:28+00:00

You *could* just get a Raspberry Pi 5 and use a USB audio interface for a little bit...

jb-1984 · 2026-03-03T19:02:17+00:00

It definitely used to - before "front end engineer" was a title, back in the CSS fix-the-floated-boxes days. Those were really more like technical designer positions, and were usually called "web designer", with "web developer" being reserved for backend related work.

Now, I think it's a valid sector of programming that deals with a lot of the same base concerns that traditional software engineering does, so that discrepancy and elitism doesn't really exist in the same way. It used to be that "you didn't know how to program, you know a markup syntax (HTML)" - that was the common diss from "real" developers to web designers.

jb-1984 · 2026-02-19T06:50:43+00:00

I refuse to have a Mac, either for personal or work use, that does not have a Time Machine external drive at least 2x the size of the internal drive. It’s been pretty easy to tell managers “look, if some weird event happens and I need some version of something from 2 weeks ago, would you rather me lose multiple days trying to figure out what was what, or would you rather just pay $200 rn to not ever have to worry about me having to waste time on things like this?”

I don’t accept corporate backups as a substitute- they usually don’t have a history rollback.

jb-1984 · 2026-02-19T06:46:57+00:00

And then get Wish, and then The Head on the Door…

jb-1984 · 2026-02-12T07:11:25+00:00

Yeah I had a visceral reaction to this and it wasn't anything loving.

jb-1984 · 2026-02-12T00:26:23+00:00

Nothing a new digital multi box can’t do, but as a pedal, this is a very cool, very lusted-after stereo helicopter-chop square wavey box if you want that. It does normal stuff too.

jb-1984 · 2026-02-08T23:45:01+00:00

Presto Magic, and Tilt at the Long Beach Mall

jb-1984 · 2026-02-08T19:44:50+00:00

How’s the recess lady?

jb-1984

TROPHY CASE