Christian

There’s a throwaway line that one of the Bobs says talking with management about the layoffs where he starts with “well just a second there professor” and it’s one I never hear quoted but for some reason that phrase gets me every time I watch it.

It took growing up to get it, but I love the scene where the peasant is explaining to King Arthur that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is a terrible basis for a system of governance.

I remember reading that the most significant impact DRM has is on security research. Individuals don’t care about bypassing DRM, but an organization is not going to fund anything involving it because of the legal concern. So if a researcher wants to look into a file format behind DRM, or the DRM mechanism itself, being used as an attack vector, that’s not going to get funding.

The defense that companies will make is that they’re happy to grant exceptions in these cases, but in practice the company will make the exceptions as narrow as possible to err on the side of maintaining as much control as possible, while a research organization will want to err on the side of avoiding potential grey areas, meaning the exceptions are inevitability too restrictive to allow much of anything to come of them.

Over ten years ago I was looking for a foss email client and I was really hesitant on claws because the interface looked ridiculously dated, but settled on it anyway because it seemed the most appropriate for me out of what was available.

The interface has received zero facelifts since then, but it’s grown to become endearing because the software has been fantastic and reliable for years. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles in an email client, so maybe it’s missing features others might want, but it does everything I care about and needs minimal setup.

Yes, I actually do interpret it that way even though I’m pretty sure I’ve never received it with that intent. Then I think “why am I like this?” and wonder if this is part of getting old. This is actually much less of a joke than it probably sounds like.

“The problem”, I explain, “is that the mods have no lives”, to conclude my essay on how using a forum introduces a risk that could potentially shave precious seconds off someone’s speedrun.

I actually have quite a high ratio on both the private trackers I use just from seeding stuff for a long time and trading points in so I can download stuff, it just doesn’t help my ratio.

I think this is a good way to use private trackers. Most will have occasional events from time-to-time as well. If you keep seeding everything you get from freeleech, eventually you’ll hit a point where your seeding benefits outpace the amount you care to download and you can just download whatever and not care anymore forever. One of mine I hit that point about six years ago and I just totally take it for granted that I can snatch anything I’m curious about. I do not understand the need to care about your ratio beyond being enough to download things you want without losing your userclass perks.

I actually like private tracker forums a lot, they are communities that no organization will ever care to astroturf and that are free of bot posts. You’re just talking with people, and as you grow to recognize some of the regulars it feels like a community. Anyway, it’s weird how normal most people on those forums are about this stuff considering how if you look at r/trackers you might get the impression that the purpose of these websites is for the users to move up a ladder like it’s a game. (Also the consensus on that subreddit is never use a tracker’s forums under any circumstances ever because you will 100% be banned for no reason because the mods don’t have lives and…what?)

Maybe it’s possible that there are many people who are not on the fediverse today for reasons similar to why you weren’t two years ago. Not that much has changed since then (other than, possibly, your own understanding).

When did you begin using the fediverse? I didn’t stop being lazy until I joined diaspora in 2011.

I feel like “Once” is the album where filler tracks started creeping into Nightwish, but “Ghost Love Score” is the Nightwish song. It’s spectacular.

Man I thought Without Face was a band lost to time. I love the song “Weird Places”.

Sandra Nasić of the Guano Apes for her appearance on Apocalyptica’s Path Vol. 2.

This song came to mind for me too. Cult is Apocalyptica’s best album, but that song basically ruined my ability to enjoy it as it was made because putting it on straight-up I’m immediately disappointed by the lack of vocals in track 1.

There was another track from that album that they reworked to add a guest vocalist to, I think track 8, but that one didn’t hit me as an improvement over the original.

After my teenage years it’s been very rare for me to dig into a band deeply enough to learn anything about their members, so the easiest examples are all going to be women doing clean vocals, which is the one time you can (usually) explicitly tell the difference just by listening. Some of my favorite examples are Liv Kristine’s work in Theatre of Tragedy, Tarja-era Nightwish, the first Stolen Babies album, and Sirenia’s first two albums along with all of Tristania’s discography pre-Rubicon.

I have two examples that immediately come to mind outside clean vocals:

Samantha Escarbe is the guitarist for Virgin Black and my understanding is she essentially splits the songwriting load with Rowan London. The Requiem stuff I still need to give more listens, but I think the first two albums are absolutely spectacular music. In “Museum of Iscariot” she does one of my favorite guitar solos I’ve ever heard.

Angela Gossow’s vocals on Arch Enemy’s “Wages of Sin” album are some of the absolute best in metal. I live for that shit. I never really got into anything else Arch Enemy did though.

Now that I think about it, I’ve also spent my whole life with a very vague idea and ultimately only pretending to know what that word means.

At some point about a decade ago I realized I’m much happier just paying the extra $8 every couple months when I go to get a haircut and otherwise just letting it grow out.

I found an explanation here. They’re deliberately not including it in the main f-droid repository for security reasons.

I think it’s extremely unlikely that there’s a reason other than what they’ve stated here, but at the same time this isn’t so important to me that I’m willing to begin making exceptions to my policy against installing any software that doesn’t make it into official f-droid.

Yeah, I wasn’t considering kodi and jellyfin as music players because they serve a broader purpose than that, but I guess they should count. I do have jellyfin set up for movies and shows, but I’ve stuck with strawberry for music because the player interface is a bigger priority for me than having a remote is.

I use strawberry now, which is a clementine derivative. Having my library in one column on the side and just pulling stuff from the library to a variable custom playlist is my preferred player style. Exaile is also like this, and deadbeef too if your library is organized and you add the filebrowser plugin. I use strawberry over those two because it’s the only one I can get from the main arch repositories and I try to minimize AUR usage.

Pragha actually fits this style too and is still in the arch repos, but I don’t understand why because it stopped getting upstream updates years ago and is a buggy mess compared to strawberry with no advantages.

I definitely miss the clementine remote though, being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don’t know any other player that has similar.

I never knew there was a name for this idea! I came up with a silly science fiction idea based on this a few years ago.

All electrical components contain magic smoke that was put into them at the time of manufacture. If that smoke is released, it doesn’t work anymore.

I love this.