The machine encourages a different relationship with sound. You learn patches rather than saving them. The physical state of the knobs is the patch. When you come back the next day and the filter is somewhere else, that's not loss — it's the next starting point.

The multi-engine slot is more interesting than it looks on paper. The user oscillator slot especially — the community has built oscillators that genuinely expand what the machine can do: FM operators, wavetable engines, physical modeling. All of these running through the analog filter.

Six months in, this is still the synthesizer I turn on first.

First thing: the caps. Almost every SE/30 board at this point has some degree of cap leakage — the original ELNA SMD capacitors have been failing for thirty years, and the electrolyte corrodes traces and pads slowly, usually without visible symptoms until something stops working. The board looked clean to my eye, but I'll rework all the caps before I power it on.

Cap kit ordered. Will document the rework process in Part Two.

What I'm hoping for: a clean recap, a working board, and enough of the original plastics to justify the yellowing removal process. The case is quite oxidized. Retr0bright or an H2O2 cream is the standard approach — I'll write about that separately.

The series is interested in work — the indignity and meaning of it, the way ambition curdles or clarifies under pressure. Hachimaki's arc is not a triumph arc. He becomes someone harder and less pleasant to be around, and the series doesn't pretend otherwise. His transformation is a cost, not a reward.

The political material — terrorism, nationalism, a UN that functions as a site of compromise rather than virtue — lands differently now. The show is not naive about institutions, and it doesn't resolve the tension cleanly.

Still one of the better science fiction series in the medium. The slower episodes in the middle third earn what comes after them.

Shot a roll of Ilford HP5+ at box speed, metering by eye. The 40mm lens is genuinely good — sharp through the center wide open, uniform across the frame by f/4. The rangefinder patch took a few frames to trust, then it was fast.

The light seals need replacing. A few frames at the beginning and end of the roll show fogging. Everything in the middle came out clean.

Developed in HC-110, dilution B. Scanned on a flatbed. The results are on the photos page.

Full recall encourages a museum attitude toward sound. You find something good and preserve it rather than developing it. The saved patch becomes a destination rather than a starting point.

Semi-modular instruments without patch memory — the Minilogue XD in its default mode, the Grandmother, the early Moogs — require you to either write down settings or accept that you're working in impermanence. That impermanence has a cost (you lose things) and a benefit (you keep moving).

The happy accidents argument: when you reset a semi-modular and start from a different place, you find things you wouldn't have gone looking for. The loss of the previous patch is the condition for discovering the next one.

I'm not against patch memory. I'm arguing for leaving it turned off sometimes.