Apple Music is slow… Spotify sucks…

Recently I’ve been re-discovering and pruning my old mp3 collection. It definitely was a snapshot of my tastes around 2015 or so (before I started using any various streaming service full time).

Anyways, my CD drive on the old Mac Pro has never been worked so hard. I’ve begun ripping all my old CD’s to FLAC and placing on my Plex server, Plex’s “Plexamp” app is awesome. No adds, no tracking, no albums randomly disappearing or all of a sudden alerting me that I am “Not authorized in this region.”

My listening habits are now slower, no longer do I have that feeling of an endless void in music (most of which) I don’t care about or will only listen once and forget amongst the daily onslaught of new stuff. Honestly, we are all creatures of habit and paying for the album or song is cheaper than renting. Bandcamp, word of mouth, second-hand CD sales (practically free in this medium) and following some specific labels I trust has been refreshing. Not to mention revisiting a lot of old label samplers and albums I’d long forgotten about.

What a great and very well written little novel! Gluttony, manipulation and lots of food! It’s not quite horror in the classical sense, definitely worth a re-read down the road.

Find a copy→

via Wikipedia

A French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late.

English speakers sometimes call this “escalator wit”, or “staircase wit”.

This came up in a recent Accidental Tech Podcast episode, I’ve never heard anyone use this, the more you know.

Halina’s mother-in-law dropped off two short reads by Kafka and Beckett the other week. Today I managed to finish the two short stories by Samuel Beckett titled “The Expelled” and “First Love” respectively. Irish dark comedy, a bit crass and surreal. It was a nice accompaniment to my recent re-watching of Black Books.

Technology, if it relies exclusively on linear thinking, is going to destroy the environment. It’s going to become too complicated to handle. … It seems to me we are getting into that kind of saurian [meaning “of or like a lizard"] situation with our technology which is going to lead us to extinction.

Alan Watts via “Seeing Through the Net” from the Tao of Philosophy lecture series.

Is this working?

A friend of mine recording under the name Fimbria has released a new album titled Votive via his label Cadent Records. I love this instrumental titled “Polyxena.”

Recorded over the course of 2020 and 2021, the eight tracks across Votive were crafted using a palette of analog and digital synthesizers, drum machines, and acoustic instrumentation. Vox, synth arpeggios, half-mortal choirs, deer bone flute, bodhrán, and bronze singing bowl combine in a waking dream of ancient oracles, burial rites, and priestly rituals performed in remote sanctuaries. Repetitious sequences, angular waveforms, and golden timbres recall the punched and incised, geometric decoration of Bronze Age grave goods and burial deposits from across the Mediterranean basin and British Isles. The songs comprising Votive are a recollection and excavation of earthly joys and losses, and the buried offerings to their memory.

Acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. It is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf

via Wikipedia

We need more specific words like this in the English language.