Volume 2 just dropped and it rewrote everything we thought we understood. Turns out the Upside Down is not a parallel dimension at all. It is a wormhole. A bridge between Hawkins and another realm called the Abyss, or Camazotz as Holly names it after A Wrinkle in Time.
Here is the chain of events as we now understand them:
The Abyss is where the Demogorgons, Mind Flayer, and all the monsters actually come from Eleven banished Henry Creel there in 1979, where he evolved into Vecna On November 6, 1983, Brenner had Eleven unknowingly search for Henry using her powers When her mind made contact with the Abyss, she accidentally created the wormhole we know as the Upside Down Brenner stabilised it using exotic matter suspended above Hawkins Lab The Upside Down is frozen in time at the moment of its creation, which is why everything looks like 1983 This is infrastructure, not magic. And infrastructure can be destroyed.
I recently spent a few days poking around the network protocol that the Line 6 Helix Stadium XL uses to communicate with its editor software. It started as idle curiosity during the Christmas break and turned into a proper reverse engineering session. By the end I had mapped out the message format, figured out how model IDs work, and learned enough to build my own tooling if I wanted to.
Something is happening in front-end development that nobody wants to talk about. A generation of developers are entering the workforce who can build beautiful interfaces but cannot explain how a flexbox actually works. They can ship features faster than ever, but the moment something breaks in a way Tailwind does not account for, they are completely stuck.
I am not here to bash Tailwind. I use it. It is a genuinely good tool that solves real problems. But we have collectively confused “faster” with “better” and are now paying the price in technical debt and mass-produced helplessness.
With Christmas approaching and work stopping for the year, naturally with more free time what does a developer with a brand new Helix Stadium XL do when they see the editor communicates over WiFi for editing? You go digging into how it works and here’s what I’ve discovered. I really should be drinking eggnog and doing nothing, but as other devs know it’s hard to stop sometimes, haha. I like to keep busy.
I recently chased a WordPress Multisite performance problem that made the admin feel unusable. Network screens like Sites and Plugins were taking about 20 seconds. That was on a healthy server and a database with no slow query alarms. It turned out to be a classic case of doing too much work on every admin request, hidden in a place most people do not look.
The fix was small and the impact was huge. If you run a large multisite, this is worth checking.
Neural DSP have dropped a teaser image and the guitar community is losing its collective mind. The silhouette shows an amp head with a wide, low profile and a centred leather strap handle sitting on top of a matching cabinet. No visible top vents. No boxy rack ears. No angled sides. If you know amps, you know what that shape is. It’s a Two Rock.
Ever since John Mayer was spotted playing through a Quad Cortex at Coachella back in April, speculation about a Neural DSP collaboration has been bubbling away in forums and comment sections. Mayer surprised everyone when he joined Zedd on stage and instead of wheeling out his usual Dumble-loaded rig, he plugged into Neural’s flagship modeller. The tones were reportedly spot on, and that kicked off months of “what if” conversations.
In less than a week, Australia becomes the first democracy in the world to ban under-16s from social media. On December 10th, 2025, platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X, Snapchat, Reddit, and Twitch will be legally required to boot millions of Australian teenagers off their platforms or face fines up to $50 million per violation.
We are about to run a massive social experiment on an entire generation. And I do not think protecting children is the real goal here.
I owned the original Helix Floor and loved it. That thing could conjure tones that made my ears genuinely happy. The amp models were solid, the effects library was extensive, and the workflow made sense once you wrapped your head around it. But there was always this nagging limitation that drove me absolutely nuts: DSP. The Helix Floor is incredibly DSP limited, and if you’re someone like me who loves pitch effects, you learned to compromise pretty quickly.
I’ve been using automatic guitar tuners for years now. The concept is simple: you place the device on a tuning peg, pluck the string, and the motorised tuner detects the pitch through vibration and rotates the peg until you’re in tune. No pedals, no cables, no staring at a screen while you turn the peg yourself. It should be the fastest way to tune a guitar, especially when you’re constantly switching between tunings.
Every time an AI music app starts feeling like the future, the labels show up with lawsuits and NDAs. This month they skipped the velvet gloves and went straight to taking the keys. The goal is not safety or artist love. It is control, and they are getting it by strangling the very features that made these tools fun.
When Udio slammed the door On October 30, Udio killed downloads without warning while announcing its Universal deal. A few days later it tossed users a 48 hour retrieval window as a peace offering, then shut the chute again. The platform that promised you owned your outputs is now a walled garden where your own songs cannot leave. The angry Discords and refund requests did not move the needle because the settlement terms mattered more than the people who built the hype.