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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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    • Kashmir - Led Zeppelin. Really anything from Physical Graffiti or by John Bonham.
    • Caravan - Buddy Rich
    • The Blues Walk - Max Roach & Clifford Brown
    • Tom Sawyer - Rush. Or really anything else with Neil Peart.
    • John the Fisherman - Primus. They won’t be the same since Tim “Herb” Alexander left the band, but I’m sure he has his reasons.(also: Hamburger Train, Over the Electric Grapevine, Tommy the Cat, Mr. Knowitall, Harold of the Rocks)
    • Discipline - King Crimson (also: Thela Hun Ginjeet and most of the rest of the album, which seems to mostly treat the guitar as a percussion instrument more than most.)

    Sorry if these are cliche.







  • There is a reason that I have fallen asleep during the extended 3rd act fight scene in every single god damn marvel movie since Mark Ruffalo became the Hulk.

    They all turn into the same movie, with the same fight. And these super long fights all seem to be surprisingly light on showing any of the actual real world impacts of such violence. Nobody ever gets seriously hurt unless the plot needs more sacrifice. But even when they do, the injuries mostly happen off camera and the blood never flows or spurts, it just instantly appears as makeup. It’s really giving people a deep rooted and totally unfounded sense that violence both solves every problem (it doesn’t) and does so bloodlessly (it doesn’t). At least Batman knows he’s not a hero.

    But really, the DC universe isn’t much better. Think about how shocking a little bit of blood at the beginning of the new Superman movie was, before they basically destroy metropolis (which was rather expected and mundane). And then they only show the tiny fraction of people personally saved by Superman, not the countless mangled corpses buried under rubble. This may be why the public has trouble confronting the realities of war and violence.




  • So, far right parents in a conservative religion in a Republican town in a Republican state produced a child so tortured by a culture of hate and violence that as soon as they even start to lean either way their instinct is murder. Breaking the cycle of hate is relatively easy compared to breaking the cycle of violence. The statements they made to their roommate (even if that heresay is true) just confirm that they were a troubled child from a troubled culture trying to change. It should surprise no one that those childish attempts would be a VERY twisted reflection of the ideal. So no, he was not part of the left. Just a child in pain reacting the only way their conservative upbringing taught them.



  • Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.



  • If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

    I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

    There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

    Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.







  • Have you never actually seen a crosswalk before? Because I’m having trouble figuring out which part of these rainbow flag colored crosswalks makes them look any less like a crosswalk or makes them less visible or recognizable in any way. Literally the only other pavement marking that comes anywhere near looking like or being placed in the same way on a road is a stop bar. And guess what, car drivers routinely mistake the plain crosswalks for stop bars, thereby blocking the crosswalk. Making the claim that painting a pedestrian crosswalk in bright colors somehow makes them less visible or recognizable has got to be the dumbest argument I’ve heard this week.