Hivemind Times Issue #32

Welcome To The Hivemind Times!

Welcome back to the mean streets of the Hivemind Times, one of the last pieces of real true hard hitting news on the world wide web. We have been just barely working to get each of our devoted readers the stories no one else would dare to write. What Cronk and Quinn have said here could have gotten them jailed if they published them in other publications. But that's what we are all about and we will never stop talking our shit. So thanks for continuing to read and support us via this powerful outlet. 

All that being said, I hope everyone’s week has been dope and slick, I know some of y'all got a lil turnt for St.Pads, hope you’ve been recovering properly. I really hope there is something for you to enjoy and sink your teeth into this week - if not I apologize sincerely. One love and bang bang.

PS friendship is stronger than nuclear bombs and tow trucks.

- Riley & Graydon

WEEKLY PLAYLIST

Graydon here, this is a playlist of shit that just isn’t normal for when you are feeling, ya know, just a lil off. I like stuff like this sometimes and each of these artists may offer an interesting little rabbit hole to adventure down which I highly encourage.

Get your freak on my dudes!

CRONK’S UPDATE

What’s in our pantry?

Welcome back,

Last week, we discussed the importance of hydration. This week, we are tackling the subject of snacking. These crunchy, salty, and/or sweet snacks provide us with ample fuel for creative breakthroughs.

The Classics

Nature Valley Oats and Honey – If a man's gotta eat, he can count on these fuckers. They are everywhere. At one point, we had hundreds, and now they're almost gone. The day we run out of these is the day the music dies.

Chips – The Cape Cod brand name is all too common around these parts. Definitely a bestseller around the office, these things fly off the shelves.

Beef Jerky Sticks – What a treat. This and a cold drink, man, will get you right. Currently, we have Chomps in stock, though any will do. Usually the first thing we run out of.

Liquid IV – Not a snack but an office staple. Personally, I think these rival narcotics in terms of things that make you feel good.

Cholula – These guys are fiends for hot sauce, but for some reason, Cholula is a hot commodity. It's like every few days, Graydon's buying a new bottle like it's a pack of cigarettes.

New Additions

Pop-Tarts – This is a newer addition to the office, but they have saved me on some of the days when real food is out of the question. It's undeniable that the brown sugar ones are one of the best snacks ever made. The s'mores are a close second.

Fig Newtons – These are my breakfast every day. They fill me with joy and happiness. Fuck off if you don't like them.

- Cronk

TRAVEL

CHI TOWN WADDUP BABY

You’ll never guess what I did last weekend. Ok I’m gonna tell you. Well I guess I titled this article as “Chi Town Waddup Baby” so I guess you could guess what I did. I went to Chicago (bing) with some of my college buddies for Saint Patrick’s Day. Let’s start with my only complaint all weekend so we can get into the fun stuff, the god damn highway toll traffic. I probably spent over an hour waiting to get through these damn things. At one point, I was in a cash/credit lane, AND THEY SWITCHED THE SIGN to an Ez Pass lane so EVERYONE had to merge into a different stand-still traffic fucker lane. But yeah man. That sucked. 

I stayed in an Aloft hotel in Riverside, right in the middle of the battlefield. Friday night was pretty relaxed, as some of my friends were still coming in late, but we hit up a few local bars. Also met a bartender named Grant for the first time, who was electric. He gave us some tips for navigating Saturday (the big one) as he likened it to Mardi Gras for green stuff. After closing the tab Friday night, and heading back to the hotel, it was time to go sleep mode. 

Saturday morning was a hellraiser, outside my 6th floor window at 7 AM it was already a complete zoo. 5 men wearing matching green tracksuits walking like programmed robots, unicycles, every emotion all at once. It was happening before our eyes. We all meet in the lobby and are waiting for my one friend (who lives in Chicago) and his brother to train over with our bar crawl wristbands. Until we get this text.

The day just got started and we’re already in a state of disarray. Now they need to train all the way back, and we caught a breakfast resi without them. Eventually (and I mean 4 hours later) we finally link up with them with our wristbands, but it's too late. At this stage of the day every single bar line was WRAPPING around the block. We took this time to go check out the river.

Yay. Green. WHERE ARE THE BEERS. We formed a genius plan to take a train and go back towards my friend's place (who forgot the wristbands) and try to find some bars out there we could actually get served at. The train was an absolute ant hill of humans. However once we got there, we knew we made the right call. NO LINES. From there on out you could basically predict what happened next. #Drunk #Pizza #Beer #Karaoke. Here’s some more pics if you want: 

- Grant

NICK’S STUFF

SERUM 2 HAS DONE IT, AGAIN

Back in 2014, Serum was released, and it quickly became one of the most groundbreaking digital synthesizers of all time.  

The squeaky clean UI, wacky wavetable options, nutty fx, and infinite drag and drop routing, all for around 100 bucks, Serum was a revolutionary smash hit.  The impact of Serum on electronic on pop music can not be understated; name a song and more than likely there is an instance of it being used in there.   At the time Native Instruments was queen, and hey — I love massive don’t get me wrong.  But using a Serum after looking at the grey withered Massive synth felt like holding an iPhone in your hand for the first time.

Now, eight years later, Steve Duda, the creator of Serum, has done it again with Serum 2.   A software engineer from Menlo Park and a musician at heart,  Duda has collaborated with artists like Deadmau5, Nine Inch Nails, and Rezz.   Approaching software design with a deep sense of passion, love, and raw curiosity rather than the typical cash grab synths you see so often these days, Duda’s team dropping Serum 2 is again a breath of fresh air.   His unique perspective on music software and love of the game leads to artist compatible, boundary pushing outcomes, and this synthesizer is a distilled example of that.

Recently, many electronic artists have been exploring granular synthesis, FM modulation, and other...ear candy sound design techniques. Serum 2 seems fully aware of this creative shift and embraces it wholeheartedly.  It combines many of these popular synthesis methods into one seamless UI, recreating that feeling of infinite flexibility and lucid manipulation of sound we all seek. 

The best part? It’s free (for anyone who already owns Serum 1)

In an era where subscription models and high price tags are becoming the norm, it feels surreal to see such a renowned and influential tool offered for less than $200—and completely free for existing users. This kind of focus on community building over profit should be immensely praised.  Companies like this are quick to charge $500 and a subscription fee for a much worse product, let alone the most name recognizable synth of modern day electronic music.

Love of the craft, improvement of the arts, and pushing sonic boundaries through technology is something that you just can’t put a price on, and Steve Duda plans on making the Serum name really mean something special and long lasting in the music world.

I won’t dive too deep into the technical details here, because part of the fun of Serum is discovering its capabilities and surfing the wave on your own. Instead, I’ll leave you with an awesome video showcasing Serum 2 in action.

internetboy out.

- Nick

ALBUM RECS

Tony’s sexy techno to have intercourse to!

QUINN’S CHEMISTRY CLASS

Supernovas are Space Nukes

Last week we learned about nuclear bombs. This week we will learn about nuclear bombs… in space.. A supernova is one of the few possible outcomes resulting from the death of a star. It is essentially a massive, naturally occurring nuclear bomb that is created when certain stars of a specific size cease to exist.

Lifecycle of a Star

We have all heard of stars, there is a big shiny one in the sky that we all love and pray to. We always ask, “What is the sun?” but we never ask “How is the sun?”. Today, I will answer both of those questions. How did the sun, and all the other stars we see in the night sky, come to be?  What exactly are they? Why do they explode sometimes?

Stars begin as a large cloud of hot gas and debris floating in space, mostly composed of hydrogen. This cloud of gas is called a “nebula”. Nebulae are huge, up to hundreds of light years in diameter. That is 1,000,000,000,000,000 miles across. You know what they say, “It’s not about how big your nebula is, it’s about how much angular momentum it has!”.  Over time, the gravity of the gas pulls the cloud inwards, forming a denser and denser clump of gas. As the nebula becomes more dense, it begins to rotate at an increasing rate, pulling even more gas inward. This process causes more and more gas molecules and atoms to interact and heat up the gas in the center of the nebula. Eventually the mass of the cloud becomes so concentrated that the gravity causes it to collapse into a protostar. A baby is born. 

A protostar looks like a dim star, but all of the light and heat comes from the initial collapsing of gas molecules into the core. By the time a protostar is formed, it is spinning so fast that the cloud of gas around it flattens out into a disk and is usually ejected through high speed jet streams at the poles of the core. The jet streams are created as a result of the magnetic field generated by the rotation of the core. After anywhere between 1 million and 100 million years, the heat and pressure inside of the core will begin to fuse hydrogen atoms together. After another few million years, the proper conditions for efficient hydrogen fusion are achieved, creating helium and an immense amount of heat and energy. The remaining gas around the core is ejected and now we have a star! 

This part of the life cycle of a star is known as the “main sequence” and what happens next depends on how massive the star is. As a star uses up all of the hydrogen in its core, it begins to fuse hydrogen from outside of its core. This causes the outer layers to expand, which increases the gravitational pressure on the core, forcing the core to contract. This process repeats continuously, expanding the star up to 400 times its original size, while the core shrinks and begins to fuse helium as it has run out of hydrogen. This stage is called a “red giant”. 

Space Bomb

A star between 0.8-8 times the mass of our sun will eventually become highly unstable and begin to pulsate, shedding its outer layers. What is left behind is a small, glowing hot core known as a “white dwarf” that will slowly cool off over billions of years. A star 8-150 times the mass of the sun will become a “red supergiant”. A red supergiant is extremely bright, up to a million times brighter than our sun. 

When a red supergiant runs out of helium to fuse, it remains hot enough to continue fusing progressively heavier elements until the core becomes entirely made of iron. Iron cannot fuse inside of a star, so once the core becomes iron, fusion stops completely and the star collapses under its own gravity. 

Usually, the outward radiation pressure from fusion within the core of the stars balances the inward force of gravity. During the collapse, the outer layers of the star “bounce” off of the extremely dense core at about 20,000 miles per second. This contracts the core close to the absolute limit of density that regular matter can be compressed into (which produces many more elements that are heavier than iron) then rebounds, resulting in a series of powerful shockwaves throughout the star and outward into space causing a massive explosion known as a “supernova”. The core collapse and resulting explosion all happen in less than a quarter of a second.

The only things that remain are the core and the material that is thrown out into space. The core will collapse even further to form either a black hole or a neutron star. Both of these objects are super weird and possess properties that are completely mysterious and not understood by our current physics. I encourage you to learn about them. The material that is ejected into space around the supernova will drift into space and become a new nebula that will form new stars and the process repeats.

- Quinn

LIVE SHOW REVIEW

Hovvdy LIVE in Ann Arbor

Sup freaks Grant here. The gang and I wandered down to Ann Arbor to catch The Hovvdy show at the Blind Pig. The show was incredible and I sang my little heart out. They played a majority of their 2024 self titled album “Hovvdy”, which made me a fan of them when it came out. They also played cuts of previous singles or albums in which I hadn’t heard before but they sounded great. I particularly loved the tempo adjustment on my favorite song “Heartstring” they incorporated for the live. Add some drums why don’t cha! 

Uhhh what other fun stuff happened that night. 

Me and Graydon split a club sandwich. I also played some darts. But MAN the after show pool scene in the basement of the venue is a battlefield. Absolute dick heads left and right. I walked up to a guy sipping a beer with a pool stick in his hand, and said “hey man do you know who’s got next game”, he looked at me and said “you’re never playing at this table”. We ended up snagging a pool table later that night. If I remember correctly I think Graydon was able to get a game in with the band when they came down after packing up their equipment. 

On the way home we had some sleepy sleepsters in the back but that didn’t stop G and I from blasting off with that funk shit. Made it home safely and in style. Bing.

- Grant

RECIPES

Guest Chef Huntley Here

Nothing signals the spring equinox like a nice piping tray of sausage and accoutrements.

You will need:

Spicy Italian Sausage

Some stiff spring green like broccoli rabe (the thin kind) or asparagus

Small potatoes

For dressing:

S&P

3 tb Rice wine vin

1 tb Dijon must

1 tsp honey

1/2 cup olive oil

Red pepper flake

Instructions:

Set the old oven to 450 degrees.

Cut your small potatoes for roasting.

Line a large cooking tray with tin foil.  Spread your cut potatoes around after tossing in some olive oil and seasoning with salt and pepp.

Lightly stab your sausages with a fork several times, then nestle in with your greased potatoes.

Put the tray in the oven for about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, whisk dressing ingredients in a bowl.  The measurements above are estimates; you may need to add more of some things to taste.  Trust your ~palette~

Trim the grey bottoms off your asparagus/broccoli, those do not taste good.

Toss the asparagus in your nice dressing but save some for pouring over at the end.  Also, if you like the dressing, you can always make more.

At the 20-minute mark take out your tray, shake it around a bit, flip the sausages, and spread your asparagus over. 

Cook another 20ish minutes, or until sausage and potatoes are browned, and asparagus/broccoli is starting to crisp up.

Remove, top with more dressing and serve.  Add a few more cracks of pepp, too.  Don’t forget to brag to your guests, s/o, God, or whoever is eating with you about how talented of a chef you are.

Yours in Madness—

- Huntley

NEW HIRE FIT CHECK

Hooters Dad Hat - $20

How to Cook Meth Hoodie - $250

Real tree Camo Tee - $20

Illig Puffy Pants - $60

Wool Socks - $5

Rick Owens x Doc Marten Suede Pentagram Boots - $1000

White Monster - hivemind fridge

MERCH