end of the year

let's do some anal isis

here are the albums i listened to most this year (see footnote)¹.

some notes about this:

1. i listened to Bright Future significantly more than songs

2. i accidentally left that Machinedrum album playing one day while working

3. a few albums are here (at least partially) because leah is obsessed with a particular song from that album, such as blómi, CTRL, Stumpwork, Telefone, Hours Were The Birds, NO THANK YOU, DAMN.. This is not to say that i didn’t listen to these albums a lot, but that when leah and i are driving anywhere we are apt to listen to a specific song from each of those albums.

here are the albums from 2024 that i listened to the most (see footnote)².

some notes about that:

1. this is skewed towards some albums that have longer track lists. the Mystery CD Hexaboxset is 120 tracks long. i only listened to it once, but it’s still the number one because i didn’t do repeat listens too much on my desktop. TRA​И​Ƨ​A is 46 tracks long.

2. while i enjoyed brat, it shows up this much because i listened to each re-release of the album in its entirety for comparison’s sake. i did listen to the album many times on its own. but i listened to brat, Brat and it's the same but there's three more songs so it's not, Brat and it's completely different but also still brat, which account for roughly 69~ listens altogether.

3. these stats are pulled from foobar on my desktop and so they do not include anything that i listened to when not using foobar on my desktop. this includes: driving, music from youtube, music on my phone, music from my media server, music on my laptop, and music at work. if this included those other statistics, we would see albums such as Bright Future, 3FOR82_D3LUX3, Two Star & The Dream Police, Diamond Jubilee, Souvenirs, #RICHAXXHAITIAN, CASTS OF A DREAMER, and Imaginal Disk completely dominate.

And here are my favorite albums of the year:

1. Adrianne Lenker - Bright Future

2. Panda Bear, Sonic Boom & Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Perez - Reset Mariachi EP

3. Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou - Souvenirs

4. Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee

5. Doechii - Alligator Bites Never Heal

6. Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk

7. Laura Marling - Patterns in Repeat

8. Nathalie Joachim - Ki moun ou ye

9. Cassandra Jenkins - My Light, My Destroyer

10. Soulstance, Jazz 2 More - Dancing With A Jazz Spirit

11. Nala Sinephro - Endlessness

12. Caribou - Honey

13. MIKE & Tony Seltzer - Pinball

14. Astrid Sonne - Great Doubt

15. Badbadnotgood - Mid Spiral

16. Shygirl - Club Shy

17. Amaarae - Roses Are Red, Tears Are Blue: A Fountain Baby Extended Play

18. Ka - The Thief Next To Jesus

19. Honey Dijon - DJ-Kicks: Honey Dijon

20. Logic1000 - Mother

this was not a great year for music for me. some artists had really standout releases (Panda Bear, Cindy Lee, Doechii, Magdalena Bay) but for the most part i feel that this was the year of the worse followup. i loved Bright Future but i prefer songs. similarly, Patterns In Repeat is great, but not as good as Songs for our Daughter. ten days is a paltry follow up to Actual Life 3 (January 1 – September 9 2022), My Light, My Destroyer is not as good as An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. Here’s a brief list of artists that had new releases this year that i did not enjoy as much as their prior release:

Nubya Garcia, Little Simz, Shygirl, Ka (RIP), 454, , Amaarae, Action Bronson, Kelela, Tigran Hamasyan, Kamasi Washington, Jeff Parker, Vince Staples, Clairo, Amyl and The Sniffers.

i listened to a ton of music this year. i listened to more new music than ever before, and i kept up with new releases more actively than in any year up til now. a lot of the music i immediately forgot, but much of it has stuck with me. my taste has shifted a lot in the past 18 months or so, so i have been trying to hunt down new things that excite me. for the most part that has been found in female folk singer songwriters, jazz (afro-jazz, hard bop, post bop), house, bossa nova, and hip-hop. i have been struggling to find hip-hop albums that i’m into these days. i’ve been enjoying RXK Nephew, HavinMotion, Vince Staples, everyone who has been on the Griselda label (Westside Gunn, Conway The Machine, Benny The Butcher, Boldy James, Mach-Hommy), Ka, Little Simz. But compared to the number of house and jazz artists i listen to, hip-hop isn’t even close, which is disappointing.

a couple stand outs this year that i did nto see coming were Reset Mariachi EP, Souvenirs, Diamond Jubilee, and Alligator Bites Never Heal. i think about each of these constantly and i think they’re all unbelievable. Doechii is incredible and has been since her first singles (thanks Tiffany for introducing me) and this album is an immediate classic. Souvenirs is a one of a kind album that paradoxically exists in the tradition of folk music that is released decades after being recorded. i don’t think Souvenirs is an easy album to listen to, but it is deeply rewarding, which is something that i look for in music. i would recommend reading a bit about the album either before or during a listen. Diamond Jubilee took me an age to get into. when it first came out i listened to it one time and sort of wrote it off, but during my review of the year’s releases i returned to it and found that it had evolved in my absence, that a repeat listen opens the album up in a pleasant and shocking way. very disarming album. disimilarly, Reset Mariachi EP is just the best parts of Panda Bear mixed with a wonderful mariachi performance. the story of how this EP was created is as charming as the music, and i find that i can listen to this EP for hours without noticing that time has passed. phenomenal EP.

i don’t have any plans for how i’m going to approach music in 2025 but i do have some plans for how i’m going to manage my music, which are also some of my new years’ resolutions:

i am going to run an ethernet line through the walls into my upstairs office and set up a server in the office. i’ll set up my network on the server and integrate the raspberry pi which i currently use for a pihole. i’ll move the main storage (4tb) from my desktop onto the server and add some more storage. during the move process i’ll use beets to re-tag all of my music and remove duplicate copies. i have 3~ tb of music at the moment and i have tons of duplicates which i hope to eliminate. also, i need to fix the tagging of my music so that i can more easily configure views / playlists / searches / analysis against things like genres, play counts, release dates, etc. i’ll move all my torrenting from my desktop the server, as well as my plex server.

probably will take like 60~ hours of work and like $2000 so it’ll be a bit of a project but i’ll get there.

i didn’t accomplish any of my professional goals for this year (learn Ansible / Kubernetes / Docker and do some development work in Rust). i did, however, accomplish some much more important goals. i bought a house, moved to ohio, got a job that pays more than my last job, went to Italy, spent a lot of time with my family. i also learned a pretty good amount of Rust, learned a pretty good amount of Go, improved at Python, improved a massive amount at PowerShell, developed my skills in Azure and Azure management quite a bit, and learned the business side of managing a mid-size service.

in 2025 i would like to get a new job. i fucking hate the place that i work. the work itself is often stupid, my colleagues are bootlickers at best and fascists at worst, and i want to make more money. it will take a little work but i can get there. i still need to learn Kubernetes and Ansible, but now i also want to tackle learning eBPF. i think i am going to take this course from bootlin. a friend recently took it and said it was highly instructive and interesting. when i put together the server for my home build, i am going to try and virtualize and containerize everything and manage it with as much automation as possible. i’ll try to use k3s or k8s or something to get some experience there, and then i’ll try to use that environment to learn basic Ansible.

i am growing worried about my career because i have a lot of experience that is irrelevant to basically every job. the experience i gained working as a Network Engineer are not as helpful as i wanted or expected them to be because of how much time we spent doing things manually, and how little time we spent actually building things. i performed deployments and upgrades for massive applications that used huge servers and required deep customization and low level knowledge, but none of that is helpful when applying for modern System Engineer jobs because of how prioritized automation is. none of the deployments i did should have been performed like that: we were doing upgrades as though it was 2003 and the only tools we had available were bash and scp. the systems i became familiar with administering are not systems i will likely ever see again, and the code that i wrote to manage those systems was archaic / unreviewed / managed totally manually due to the poor culture of the company. similarly, at my current position, i am the only one who does automation on my team. when my colleagues attempt automation, they inadvertantly cause huge problems and delay progress. so when i go to apply for Systems Engineer or Systems Admin or Platform Engineer or DevOps Engineer jobs i find myself confronted with the fact that the most commonly used automation tools (Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Chef, Terraform) are tools that i have vanishingly little professional exposure to. it’s difficult to feel hopeful that i will be able to continue making a lot of money doing these sorts of jobs when i have 5 years of experience with 0 exposure to the most in-demand skillsets.

however, i am motivated and smart and i will be able to learn these things with some dedication and time.

goals for 2025:

• go to the philippines

• get a new car

• buy a new wardrobe

• learn K8s / Ansible

• get a new job making over $150k a year (ideally $200k)

  • at new job, get to use languages like Go / Rust

• pick up some sort of hobby that is physical (rock climbing or lifting or something)

• build a server

  • tag and transfer all music / media to it

  • set up remote access

• finish painting our house

• finish furnishing our house

  • dining room table

  • credenza

• build new computer

• get new audio equipment

  • new speakers / amp

  • CD player

  • record player

  • cd / vinyl storage

• cook more

should be a pretty easy year even though it looks like a lot.

here’s a playlist:

(note: R.A.P. Ferreira - reciting the alpha's bet is not on youtube).

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4bUgvWbrZGIJyF0cXC3wzyeflVbyP0KO

mega: https://mega.nz/folder/aJtGHCzL#CY4wx-1LazAw9uUNFTmElQ

1. Panda Bear, Sonic Boom & Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Perez - Reset Mariachi EP

2. Mk.gee - Two Star & The Dream Police

3. Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee

4. Caribou - Honey

5. Sofia Kourtesis - The Warehouse Project: Sofia Kourtesis, Manchester (DJ Mix)

6. Soulstance, Jazz 2 More - Dancing With A Jazz Spirit

7. Adrianne Lenker - TRANSA

8. R.A.P. Ferreira - OUTSTANDING UNDERSTANDING

9. Cassandra Jenkins - My Light, My Destroyer

10. Nicholas Craven & Boldy James - Penalty of Leadership

11. Nala Sinephro - Endlessness

12. Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk

13. Lupe Fiasco - Samurai

14. Kneecap - Fine Art

15. gyrofield - A Faint Glow of Bravery

16. Fontaines D.C. - Romance

17. Denzel Curry - King Of The Mischievous South Vol. 2

18. Doechii - Alligator Bites Never Heal

19. Fcukers - Baggy$$

20. RXKNephew - Always Remember Me

21. DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ - Sorcery

22. Yaya Bey feat. Exaktly - Ten Fold

23. 1010benja - Ten Total

24. Boldy James & Harry Fraud - The Bricktionary

1. Machinedrum — 3FOR82_D3LUX3 (355)

Ducks Ltd. — Get Bleak (344)

Adrianne Lenker — songs (319)

Adrianne Lenker — Bright Future (280)

Florist — Florist (266)

100 gecs — 10,000 gecs (158)

Tierra Whack — Whack World (156)

Little Simz — NO THANK YOU (154)

Westside Gunn — And Then You Pray for Me (141)

Cookin Soul & Tha God Fahim — Supreme Dump Legend : Soul Cook Saga (138)

Adrianne Lenker — Hours Were The Birds (135)

Big Thief — Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (133)

Joanna Newsom — The Milk-Eyed Mender (128)

Mac DeMarco — This Old Dog (121)

RXK Nephew — Till I'm Dead (117)

DAZEGXD — vKiSS (113)

Nia Archives — Silence Is Loud (112)

Susanne Sundfør — blómi (112)

Antônio Carlos Jobim — Stone Flower (101)

Bruiser Wolf — My Story Got Stories (101)

Danny Brown — Quaranta (100)

Earl Sweatshirt — Some Rap Songs (99)

Various Artists — Mystery CD Hexaboxset (97)

Feist — The Reminder (92)

Duwap Kaine — Goldmine (90)

BoofPaxkMooky & Dylvinci — In a Tree (86)

Caixa Cubo — Modo Avião (86)

Charli xcx — BRAT (84)

Four Tet — Three (82)

SahBabii — Saaheem (81)

Clairo — Sling (80)

Mavi — Shadowbox (80)

Charli xcx — how i’m feeling now (78)

Common & Pete Rock — The Auditorium Vol. 1 (78)

Kendrick Lamar — DAMN. (77)

Dry Cleaning — Stumpwork (75)

Missy Higgins — The Second Act (75)

Noname Gypsy — Telefone (75)

Akini Jing — VILLAIN (74)

Cassandra Jenkins — An Overview On Phenomenal Nature (73)

Solange — A Seat at the Table (73)

Feist — Metals (72)

Feist — Multitudes (72)

SZA — Ctrl (Deluxe) (72)

HavinMotion — MOTION (71)

PinkPantheress — Heaven knows (70)

Tomberlin — i don't know who needs to hear this... (67)

Cindy Lee — Diamond Jubilee (65)

Freddie Gibbs & Madlib — Piñata (65)

SahBabii — LeakOut (65)"

2. Various Artists - Mystery CD Hexaboxset (120)

Charli XCX - BRAT (90)

Nicholas Craven & Boldy James - Penalty of Leadership (88)

Common & Pete Rock - The Auditorium Vol. 1 (86)

Bruiser Wolf - My Story Got Stories (86)

Astrid Sonne - Great Doubt (85)

Marika Hackman - Big Sigh (84)

Helado Negro - Phasor (79)

Bill Ryder-Jones - Iechyd Da (78)

Denzel Curry - King Of The Mischievous South Vol. 2 (72)

Madi Diaz - Weird Faith (72)

AKINI JING - VILLAIN (68)

glass beach - plastic death (64)

Clairo - Charm (62)

Katy Kirby - Blue Raspberry (61)

Ariana Grande - eternal sunshine (slightly deluxe) (51)

LOE Shimmy - Zombieland 2.6 (51)

Kali Uchis - Orquideas (48)

Alvaro Diaz - SAYONARA (48)

Mary Halvorson - Cloudward (48)

Merky Ace - Guts And Glory (48)

evilgiane - #HEAVENSGATE, VOL. 1 (48)

Joey Valence & Brae - NO HANDS (48)

Skee Mask - C (46)

Louke Man - Sd-2 (46)

Duwap Kaine - Goldmine (46)

Various Artists - TRANSA (46)

Vayda & ATTNWH0RE - fever (45)

µ-Ziq - Grush (44)

fucksnowrr - #NotADeluxe (44)

Vera Sola - Peacemaker (44)

Masaka Masaka - Barely Making Much (42)

Actress - Statik (41)

Kelela - RAVE:N, The Remixes (41)

Total Blue - Total Blue (40)

Cowboy Sadness - Selected Jambient Works, Vol. 1 (40)

Fred again.. - ten days (40)

Reyna Tropical - Malegría (40)

Clarissa Connelly - World of Work (38)

21 Savage - american dream (38)

Don Toliver - HARDSTONE PSYCHO (37)

Kneecap - Fine Art (37)

Badbadnotgood - Mid Spiral (36)

Rebe - es que acaso no me oyes?? (36)

Stay Flee Get Lizzy - Stars Aligned (36)

Honey Dijon - DJ-Kicks: Honey Dijon (36)

Paolo Fresu - Legacy (36)

jackzebra - 王中王 (35)

Kyle Hall - EXP (34)

Tapir! - The Pilgrim, Their God and The King of My Decrepit Mountain (34)

xaviersobased - keep it goin xav (34)