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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • For normal albums: Artist/Year - Album [release ID if necessary for ambiguity for various versions of an album]/Disc-track - title.extension . Compilations (soundtracks, promo mixes from shows, etc.) get “Various Artist” as the album artist and sorted under “Various Artists” of the top level of my albums directory. Stuff from other sources would sometimes get their own special directory at the top level outside “albums”.

    Tags are everything, that’s where the in-depth data is. album folders hold extra art, inserts, metadata, etc.

    I don’t really make manual playlists using relatively pathed m3u anymore because support is inconsistent across the apps I’ve used to listen to my library. These days Plex, jellyfin, ncmpcpp (tui front-end for mpd) all handle their own playlists. Those are mostly just spontaneous groupings or automated shuffles I don’t really keep track of.

    Back in the day I made mixtapes on actual cassettes, recorded from the radio, my CDs, and later tracks I found on Napster and soulseek. Later I moved on to making tons of playlists in foobar2000. Some of those playlists probably still litter my hard drive (now dead text because the files having long since been reorganized and moved). For the really good tight playlists I made of that era, I’d make physical mix CDs that I would master with sound forge. Had a few people that would trade these around. Make a mix, master, make many copies, distribute. Those CDs often died in cars and turned into coasters, so I’d keep the bin and cue files of the masters to make replacements. Those tracks would ultimately get turned back into mp3 or flac depending on quality and tagged with my own title, cover art, etc. and get filed away in the Various Artist folder. Then I got an mp3 player and it’s been either full album listening or dynamic playlists for me ever since.

    I still make yearly playlists in Spotify as I discover new stuff or rediscover old stuff, like a musical diary. Those playlists inspire library additions via the artist directly, Bandcamp flac files, or other means.



  • Have you seen the preview? It gives away pretty much the entire plot. This movie seems to share a lot more in common with Coraline than the theme of the title. Strip away from Coraline the fanciful neighbors, talking cat, and layer the supernatural world directly on top of the real world (in place of Coraline’s Being John Malkovich style umbilical tunnel). Then smother the characters with generic horror elements popular today. Now you have this movie, which is “totally not Coraline minus everything that reminds us of Neil Gaiman, we promise.” They clearly made this movie because someone wanted a live action Caroline, but didn’t want to deal with the ick and marketing disaster of producing the work of a once beloved, now known creep and abuser, author.







  • Why immediately shame the guys choosing the unicorn as the weird guys? And add in a little homophobia to boot? That is exactly the problem with defining gender stereotypes based on sex at birth. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a boy wanting to dig a terrifying and deadly fae creature with a fucking sword on its face from the heart of a dead giant. There is also nothing wrong with a boy wanting to dig a majestic pony from out of a pink heart shaped cocoon.

    You’re the one perverting this into something about grown men having fantasies about fucking horses. We all know bronies exist and their tastes may not be for everyone, but that’s a poor excuse for this brand of cringe hate mongering.


  • Well, it seems that every time a search engine’s AI gives me a definitive and wordy “answer” to a question I search and provides a helpful citation of the page from which it got that answer, it is ALWAYS just a completely hallucinated answer that the cited page in no way supports. This isn’t just hyperbole, this has been my experience with every single search engine AI summary

    And I find myself having to go back and fix the autocorrect that my phone keyboard “helpfully” makes with increasing frequency. It used to be that autocorrect would just fix a typo when I’d obviously typed gibberish because I missed a key. But now, it is regularly replacing entire words that I’ve typed completely correctly with some other word that makes absolutely no sense.

    I’m all for some specific uses of AI. Things like speech to text or images to text? Sure that’s a great use. But when it comes to research, writing, or spreadsheets, AI tools just need to shut up and stay the fuck out of my way. I’m becoming convinced a little more everyday that anyone using AI to summarize articles or search results is a complete moron and shouldn’t be trusted.




  • I have 2 editions of The Gunslinger because Stephen King revised some parts to fit better with the remaining novels. The Gunslinger is a very early work and it shows. I’ve read the first 3 books of the dark tower series at least twice. Last time through the series, after King “completed” it, I started with the original The Gunslinger and ended the series with the revised edition. The differences are relatively minor and, although I am generally a fan of his, I prefer the rough edges of the original. Reading the original first and the revised edition last felt more like a conclusion and coming full circle than the final book ever could have. Despite the differences, they still feel like the same book to me.






  • We don’t just tell stories, we repeat stories and re-tell stories. It’s been happening since before literature or the stage even existed. Even the Odyssey wasn’t an entirely original story. Our very first records of literature are literally stories that were told and re-told and re-told and refined and reformed and re-told for generations. Re-telling stories is a fundamental thing common to practically every human. It’s what we do and what we are. It’s not the end of the world, it’s just the mortar that binds our individual experiences into civilization. You don’t need to weep, you just need more art and literature in your life, maybe fewer headlines about movies for toddlers.

    If you’re bored with a story you’ve seen before, there’s a good chance it wasn’t made for you, let the people it was made for have it. I think I can safely say that the next Airbud movie wasn’t made for you or anyone here. I’m okay letting the kids have their Airbud movie without being snarky about it.