[SML] Ion rant (was: LD for Crazy...)

[*Hobbit*]

Mention of "knowing Ion inside and out" jogs me to de-lurk and post
some of my own rudimentary findings from a recent weekend, when
I managed to learn some more programming subtleties on one.  Now,
I sort of cut my teeth on Hogs and have at least did a little reading
on other ML type boards over time, so I've got that bias going in ...
but the more I find about Eos/Ion the more I just go "wtf?" as
the design feels like it's just twisted basic concepts all out
of whack.

I needed to do a bit of busking setup, e.g. separated parameters
I could bring together on the fly at playback but which wouldn't
stomp each other across submasters/cuelists, and got some good
hints from a colleague who wasn't dead certain about the steps
but got me going in the right direction.  I still don't think I
had the optimal procedure, but I wrote up what I discovered:

   http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/pix/a18/part03.html

The "deep Ion geekery" bit is in an offset box near the beginning,
and I'd love some commentary on it and what I did wrong.  The rest
of the page [and the other parts] is probably of less interest, but
is all part of the ongoing series of tech "debrief" writeups on our
local SF convention that I've been working for a decade-plus.

_H*