• 11 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • perhaps there’s a alien civilization out there that’s done all this already that you can buy a colonization/uplift from. That might reasonably be a short if expensive order

    This.

    And if we’re speculating, why not go all the way and say we also don’t know it would be expensive. Who’s to say it would not cost, say, $15? Wouldn’t it be fun to get a Star Trek system for, like, so cheap that a kid could afford it?

    (I would make sure to read the fine print, though.)







  • I have lots of music which I got basically for free, and a lots of music for which I paid.

    My general attitude towards music is that I’m in it to explore, learn and enjoy the indescribable human connection that I get through, and only through listening to someone’s little “message in a bottle”. Doing this for many years (I’m 44 so over 30 years now) I’ve learned that training my brain on multiple styles and genres, the connection can always get deeper and more rich.

    So I would not be able to ever say a purchase was not worth it, because I would always assume such decision to be rushed. I had too many experiences when I listened to something, didn’t quite like it, but later I somehow “grew into” it, and then I learned to love it for years and years.

    Different music ends up playing different roles in my life. Some albums end up teaching me a genre or a style, some end up acting like a gateway drug, some end up as a “stand in” for whole genre. Some end up as “holy relics” of who I was, and are re-visited from time to time to see whether I’ve changed and how. Some end up on a shelf and get re-discovered, some end up on a shelf forever.

    (That “stand in” part is kinda tongue-in-cheek, but it sometimes almost works; eg. I would never set out to get a Dub album, but Dub Guerilla is one of the 100 best things I’ve ever heard, and it’s just so darn satisfying that it satisfies all and any of my Dub needs.)

    Sometimes my brain can be just really petty about things, like completely disregarding an album because of a track or a section which I feel is a mistake. Sometimes I just know I will need much more time, sometimes I feel certain things might remain hard to get into maybe forever.

    Don’t get me wrong, somewhere among those piles, there are really things that I won’t ever care to pick up, and perhaps would not purchase them again, but it almost never has much to do with number of listens. It might be things that I just got with bad expectation (ie. not listening upfront) or things that I enjoyed because of content (eg. lyrics) but I have changed and moved on.

    Other times music is best experienced live, for some bands the “spirit” simply cannot be tamed, let alone reproduced. Sometimes I get album from band directly after a show and then end up never feeling it again from the CD, but then again, I would say it was not worth it, because it’s still a great way to “tip” the artist, and sometimes it will just work out.

    (A bit more related to the OP: Incidentally, just today I broke my all-time record by spending about 20 EUR for V​í​n by Janus Rasmussen, and for reasons completely unrelated to OP and the price (but related to a sub-thread) I also did something I would never do normally–put one of the tracks on repeat for several hours. That’s not to brag about money–it’s just funny how it ended up accidentally as “$ per listen” experiment, although )



  • my music routine generally implies having a song or two on repeat for the day because they are a form of stimming for me

    I’m not on spectrum on anything (anything diagnosed, anyway) but your comment inspired me to try and have a favorite tune on repeat for several hours, just to see what effect it would have on my ability to focus & anxiety, both of which are things I tend to struggle (although in my case it’s more related to insomnia).

    Interesting experience, nicer than I would expect. Normally my music routine is to try and keep things diverse, but I do tend to get distracted by the need to choose what’s next (and radios can have own problems, alghough soma.fm is awesome.) This sort of removed the issue.

    I do wonder how I will feel like when I turn it off, then in dreams, and then tomorrow. 😁

    (It’s ‘87’ by Janus Rasmussen, by the way, and even after hours I’m still loving it!).



  • I’m a debian-er at heart, as much as I’d praise it (and have, in other thread in this post), there’s one issue that might be relevant. Almost all of this has been with Debian 10 and 11, I think it’s been improved in 12, though, but I’m not sure.

    See, I have sister to whom I gave laptop with Debian & Xfce. And created normal (non-admin, non-sudo) users for her as well as both of her kids. Now when they login, NetworkManager will refuse to let them use Wi-fi connection, and require them to choose a different (admin) account and type its password.

    Unfortunately although I’ve been seeing this issue for years now, I never had an opportunity to test it properly, since it always seems to happen to non-admin users only. Also I’m not sure if NM can properly manage connections if a non-admin user creates it – will it let other non-admin define the same connection? And I spend 99% time on a desktop (mini-pc) with ETH connection, being sudoer, and no Xfce, so I never get to “enjoy” any of these.

    (This is also particularly ironic because I always set up wireguard and tell them “if you have any problem, just call me, I can fix it remotely” – and then literally the only problem they ever have is the one I can NOT fix remotely. 😆 )

    Also sometimes after login the system will bug them with “unlocking keychain” dialog which can’t be closed, but that could be just side effect of the NM issue and/or just Xfce thing.


  • I’ve been using almost exclusively Debian for over 15 years now, and experimenting with it (not stable) couple years longer. Last time I had issues booting or upgrading was loooong time ago, but I think I was using sid back then. (Yeah, I was young & restless back then! 🧓 🙃 )

    Traditionally, the flipside of this was that the packages were sometimes old. Maybe 10 years ago I would still have reasons to complain about some parts being too old but nowadays I have basically no issues. Especially since most such gaps can be filled with flatpak or AppImage. (I rely on flatpak for Signal, Telegram, Minecraft, and AppImage for NeoVim and several other things.)

    (My usage is development under i3+alacritty+nvim, browsing using qutebrowser (running directly from git repo), Firefox and Chromium, sometimes gaming, mostly steam or gog.)

    One point, though, In my experience Firefox is updating much more often than “once a year”, which is annoying because it basically goes on a strike every time.