So edgy.

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.

Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.

“pretty easy” is a bit of a stretch

I can tell that this particular port is more or less from the same time as the PS2 ports in the post’s photo because of the color. The standardization of this port happened long before the standardization of colors to indicate the capabilities of said port. We mostly only see this in variously capable USB ports today. If I remember correctly this yellow color would have been used for a joystick or controller of some kind, but there may have been other ports with the same shape and pin configuration that would have different purposes.

My teacher one year gave me an F because he didn’t bother to grade anything in a timely fashion, also didn’t store (or organize) any student assignments that had been handed in, and when the end of the year came made me go digging through a giant stack of everyone’s assignments to find mine to prove I deserved a reasonable grade AFTER I had already been sent home with an F. I eventually got the grade I deserved, but I shouldn’t have had to fight for it like that. Apparently this was a common routine for this teacher, but lots of students didn’t bother to fight it. It didn’t get fixed until that cabinet was physically emptied and I handed all the assignments back to their authors.

I am thinking of the teachers. And I think OPs situation is remarkably similar. But kids, being kids, will not be heard by adults when they shout warnings, like “Why haven’t you graded and returned any of my assignments yet this term?” or “This valuable/dangerous thing should be secured, who responsibility is that?” It may not be moral advice, but like the song says, sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

If you were in highschool at the time, really the only ethical thing to do for someone in your position is to delete all the files and shine a light on their bad security practices, but don’t say anything about it to anyone. It’s that last bit that always gets you in trouble. Absolute candor is something adults almost never want to hear from children.

It’s not one more day, it’s tomorrow. If it’s already Thursday, then it’s usually already much less than a day till Friday (because we usually sleep through the first quarter of the day). Wednesday night there is only one more day till Friday.

I want the word “unalived” to be killed or murdered in the most vile and explicit way possible for a word.

I’m not making excuses for anyone, but I’ve accidentally done this. On my phone and messaging app, if I read a text and leave the conversation open (not exiting the thread and the app) I won’t get any further notifications from that person no matter how much they text. I’m sure it’s a setting somewhere, but the setting is dumb. Like, surely I don’t want a bunch of pings when I’m actively conversing with someone and looking at the app, but leaving the thread open and the screen off “should” still get a notification, even if the app is open under my lock screen.

Portal 3?

Strange New Worlds catches the feels of TOS without feeling dated. It honors the best of TOS, Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager, but leaves behind the parts that don’t really work anymore. There are women on the bridge and Rick Berman’s shadow is long gone. Although there is still some interpersonal drama, it doesn’t feel nearly as center stage as it did in Discovery, focusing more on the adventure and focusing less on ACTING-centric monologues that made Discovery unbearable sometimes. I wouldn’t call the politics luke warm, though they are maybe a more subtle and less center stage than they were in Discovery. In general, my feeling is that Strange New Worlds has distanced itself from all the parts of Discovery that didn’t work for me.

My chief gripe is that Spock is often way more emotional than makes sense.

-A millennial that watched every episode of Next Generation at least twice, once when they aired and again from VHS tapes when my dad got home from work. I guess I’ve watched them all way more than twice now.

Whataboutism isn’t a very convincing argument.