many such cases

you can tamp down joints with the back end of the pen piece inside a pilot g2

i saw a tiktok the other day from a creator that was like “i am listening to 1000 albums in a year” and then they show the albums they’ve listened to recently. my first thought was “only 1000 albums?” but then i saw people in the comments saying stuff like “1000 albums is way too much, slow down” which made me laugh and also feel disproportionately annoyed because it’s such a fucking stupid thing to say. i told leah about it and she was also enraged. very very very fucking dumb thing to say.

i wanted to check and see how many albums i listen to in a year usually. i don’t keep rigorous records of my listening habits at all: i scrobble from my computer to last.fm, and i scrobble from my phone to last.fm, but this doesn’t catch everything.

i could potentially look at using foo_sqlite to access the database that foobar uses, and then i could run a query like “select * from medialibrary where last_played after 01-01-2024 and play_count >= 1” but for some reason foo_sqlite wasn’t seeing anything as being modified since 2022, so it always returned 0 if i was using any queries that looked for data after 2022. so i scrapped that.

i was able to eventually find the answer by using the media library search and the foobar2000 query syntax, using the query “%play_count% greater 0 and %date% equal 2024%” which showed that i have listened to about 600~ albums which were released in 2024. i wanted to find every album i’ve listened to in 2024, so i changed the syntax to be “%play_count% greater 0 and %first_played% equal 2024” which showed that i have listened to about 700~ albums in 2024.

the problem with %first_played% is that it’s from a foo_first_played, a 3rd party component. since i haven’t had that component installed for all of 2024, and because that doesn’t count albums i have listened to anywhere except in foobar, it’s not wholly accurate. to bridge that gap, i looked on last.fm to see the how many albums i have scrobbled. last.fm shows that i have scrobbed about 1500~ albums in 2024. however, it wasn’t showing that i had listened to Big Thief nearly as much as i have (i listened at work on my phone to Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You for multiple weeks, so it should dominate my scrobbles). so i suspected that it wasn’t scrobbling correctly. i investigated and found a couple issues:

1. if i am listening to music on my computer and it is scrobbling there, then i pause the music and play music from my phone, it is not guaranteed to start scrobbling. often it will take multiple hours to begin scrobbling from my phone

2. if i have youtube or foobar open on my phone, and then i play music on my logitech media server and start scrobbling it via Squeezebox integration, last.fm will not scrobble the lms scrobbles. i need to have both foobar and youtube closed when i start scrobbling there. this is because squeezer (the squeezebox management app) is on my phone and the last.fm scrobbling daemon on my phone just looks at the open apps to determine what to scrobble, and if there are multiple options available it usually sticks with the oldest.

3. last.fm often doesn’t always scrobble correctly from foobar. there was an old issue with foo_scrobble where it would pull the wrong time from your PC clock and then fail to scrobble with last.fm because it fails a time check handshake. i missed a significant portion of my plays in recent years due to this error, and for the first part of 2024 i missed many plays.

4. last.fm doesn’t always scrobble correctly from my phone. for example, it will count a youtube video as 1 scrobble, 1 track, 1 album, and log it under the “artist” which is the name of the youtube channel. this presents a pretty serious problem because i watch a lot of youtube videos. in years past, this has meant that people like jorbs and dogdog show up in my last.fm “most listened artists” count, and it artificially inflates my album numbers.

i don’t really have a way of auditing my scrobbles. there is a foo_lastfm_playcount component which allows you to pull playcounts from last.fm and then tag your music with those playcounts, so i could potentially use that to match my playcounts up against last.fm and then join that with a collection of my music locally and find the music that’s in either or both. but i am not going to do that. so given that scrobbles are inaccurate, my personal tracking is inaccurate, i don’t have a source of truth, i don’t have methods of auditing or validating the data, and i don’t have any way of fixing what data i have which i do know is wrong, none of the numbers i have are accurate.

however, i did pull the data from last.fm and then manually remove all the youtube videos i could find and then manually compare it to some of my personally collected data, and i looked at numbers of albums downloaded and some other stuff, i’ve been able to determine that i’ve listened to no less than 1300 albums this year, and no more than 1600. that works out to between 4 and 5 albums a day, every day, for the entire year.

this feels close to accurate. there have definitely been periods where i listened to nothing new (like the Big Thief era mentioned above) but there have been other periods where i listened to nothing except new albums. today, for example, i have listened to 6 albums. i have at least 3 more that i’ll listen to before the end of the day. that would put me at 9 or 10 albums on the day. assuming i have days like this 2 times a week, those days would add up to like 850~ albums (math: 329 days since start of the year is 47 weeks. 2 days per week is 94 days total. 94*9 == 846, 94*10 ==940.) and i have, of course, listened to albums more than just those 2 days per week, and i have had large outlier days where i did nothing but listen to music for 12+ hours straight.

i can’t really provide a picture of how many new albums i’ve listened to, though. it is somewhere above 800 and less than 1500. no idea where in that range. staying on the same schedule for the rest of the year, i’ll listen to between 1440 and 1775 albums this year.

that being said, here’s my top 20 albums of the year so far. it’s a work in progress, and i’ll post my final list at the end of the year as i always do, but i was working on this earlier and i wanted to share.

Work in progress top 20:

1. Adrianne Lenker - Bright Future

2. Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou - Souvenirs

3. Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee

4. Doechii - Alligator Bites Never Heal

5. Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk

6. Laura Marling - Patterns in Repeat

7. Nathalie Joachim - Ki moun ou ye

8. Nubya Garcia - Odyssey

9. Berlioz - open this wall

10. Four Tet - Three

11. Common & Pete Rock - The Auditorium Vol. 1

12. Machinedrum - 3FOR82

13. Little Simz - Drop 7

14. Ka - The Thief Next To Jesus

15. Logic1000 - Mother

16. Shygirl - Club Shy

17. Nala Sinephro - Endlessness

18. Cookin' Soul & Tha God Fahim - Supreme Dump Legend : Soul Cook Saga

19. Nia Archives - Silence Is Loud

20. Molly Lewis - On the Lips

There are some albums which aren’t on the list because i have only listened to them once or not at all, but i suspect they will displace something on the list:

070 Shake - Petrichor

salute - TRUE MAGIC

Kendrick Lamar - GNX

Michael Kiwanuka - Small Changes

Bambounou, Priori - C.R.U.S.H.

Jeff Parker ETA IVtet - The Way Out of Easy

SPARKLE DIVISION - TRANSA

Nilüfer Yanya - My Method Actor - The Remixes

Bambu - If You See Someone Stealing Food... No, You Didn't.

Flo - Access All Areas

Akai Solo - DREAMDROPDRAGON

but we’ll see what the end of year list ends up looking like. for the most part i think 2024 has not been a great year for music. i’ve (obviously) found quite a bit music to listen to and enjoy, but most of my enjoyment from music listening this year has been from finding older releases. some obvious exceptions are the top 5 of my work in progress list above. those albums are top notch, super good, and i will be returning to them for a long time i believe.

some other thoughts of mine

if you saw these things posted on facebook just keep scrolling

• saw the new gladiator movie. it's horrid. one of the worst movies I've ever seen. only redeemable quality is Denzel Washington but even he couldn't save it. god awful trash. 1/10

• i did not do any of my professional goals for this year. i distracted myself with weed and video games. also the inescapable malaise of life and my rising level of anxiety and ill humor along with my decreasing interest in my professional studies and my knowledge that every job i get contributes to evils beyond my imagination. also my general satisfaction with the direction of my life makes me less and less motivated. but i am pivoting from focusing on Rust and Kubernetes to learning Go and Ansible because they are more in demand in the areas im focused on and i think learning them enough to use them in a job will go pretty quickly given my knowledge of Terraform and my continually increasing knowledge of both programming and how to learn to program.

• people really can't help themselves. someone will be like "have you all noticed how annoying it is when people get into these intractable debates about stupid stuff like if chili is a soup?" and then the comments are like "lol so annoying. it is a soup though" like come the fuck on, can you not see what you're doing is what they're complaining about??? how are you so obtuse?????? or like someone will say "i am going to try and piss you off: trump good" and it will get 2 million views 500k likes and have 20000000 comments being like "GO KAMALA! NOT MY PRESIDENT" it's unbelievable. they can't help themselves

• i feel like it's so corny to miss college but i do. even though it was a difficult period in my life i also had so much support, so many friends, tons of opportunities, structure, exercise, external motivators that were effective. i made countless mistakes and shirked much of the responsibility i had and still found success, insight, growth, and community.

• the level of evil perpetrated against the people of Africa can not be overstated and can never be forgotten, even for a moment. it undergirds the entirety of the world as we know it -- every country, every political movement, every company, every organization, every culture has been shaped by the irreconcilable fact that europeans have committed countless atrocities to Africa and African people.

• read Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai

• if you ask people to say nice things about you they will say nice things about you. and what’s more is that they won’t lie to you. they’ll say nice things and those nice things will be true. very very important to keep in mind

• it’s time to write more poetry

i haven’t been working much lately. i’ve been taking a lot of liberties at work and i’ve been thinking about my history of pushing rules and then finding myself in positions that other people don’t understand. i have always been compelled by finding loopholes or blindspots. i like to read rules very closely and i like to push at interpretations of rules to find what is hidden behind them. at my current job this means i work from home 4 or 5 days a week instead of the prescribed 2. at my previous job this meant i was able to go on vacations more often. at my first tech job it meant i got some computers and a monitor and a better job title. in college i got a job by just telling people i got the job. i love stuff like that. improperly implemented authority deserves whatever comes to it as a result of those failures, and people who have such authority lorded over them ought to pick at these edges to gain an advantage.

i haven’t been doing much at work lately. there’s not much for me to do and i find it loathsome. the company is evil the people are dreadful the environment is godawful. the work itself is easy and boring and requires very little thought or effort. the expectation is that it takes me about 10x longer to accomplish anything than it actually does. i am doing everything i can to maintain that expectation, and it’s working well. people think i am very busy and that the things i am working on are very laborious.

it sucks and it feels like shit. i have been thinking about my ideal job. what sort of work i would do if i could do anything. i would, i think, most prefer to work on a team of people who are responsible for managing a set of servers that host services for p2p media sharing. something like what.cd or btn. sites like that are some of the last bastions of what makes the internet very good and i love participating in them, so i think that would be nice.

christmas is coming up and i need some new stuff. i need new denim, boots, sneakers, shirts, a winter jacket. i want new perfume, a candle, a knife, a shotgun, a rifle, a dining table, a bookshelf, lamps, chairs. new speakers. film. more cameras. another receiver. a server. i want someone to run ethernet through my walls into my upstairs office.

and here’s something i wrote about my grandmother’s health declining a couple weeks ago:

my grandmother is dying. she's been dying for a while, and she is dying now. she has strokes regularly. and seizures. she starts sentences and forgets what she's saying. she often forgets who she is talking to. but she knows everyone in the family and is still talking to us, still loving us, still caring.

leah and i sat with her for a bit last week. she was in her recliner and we were on a couch and a chair. she asked about our trip to Italy and I showed her pictures. she told us stories of when she went to Italy with her deceased husband, Charles. she asked about our house, and looked at pictures, and told us how proud she is, and then she started crying a bit and said "I hope I can come see it someday." but I think we all knew she won't, she likely won't leave go anywhere except the hospital or the hospice facility until she is dead.

some of the family came to visit: my cousins, my aunt, my sister and her family, my sister and her husband. my uncle will be here on Thursday. i hosted a get together at my mother's house because she is spending all her time taking care of her mother. we played with the children of the family and chatted and ate food. people took turns going to the hospital to sit with my grandmother. she had a stroke and a seizure and then fell asleep, then she woke up and my sister played some Carol King for her. she recognized it immediately and my sister and my cousins sang with her for a bit.

every conversation has been tinged lately. everyone's a little gentler and softer and at any given time someone might start crying. the women in my family, my sisters and mother and cousins and aunt, stayed up together till 4 the other night sharing stories and laughing and crying and talking and revealing family secrets, healing each other.

and they have all left now, gone back to California and Columbus and other places. and my grandmother still sits in the hospital, with my mother by her side, holding hands and watching The Bachelor or just sitting silently or crying or talking. having strokes and seizures. waiting patiently.

i have been struggling to go see her more. i find it painful and almost embarrassing. why should she care about my recent trips in the face of such pain, in light of what's to come? how does she still find joy in asking me about my hobbies, my life, my friends, knowing that she will be dead so soon? of course i know the answer: it's all any of us have. the pain and the death are coming for us all, why does it matter if it's in two weeks or two centuries? we care, and ask, and find joy, and laugh, and whatever else it is that we do, and it will all be over soon enough.

my cousin was in town to see me, he planned a trip without knowing about my grandmother (he is from a different, but related, part of the family) and so we went for some hikes. we went driving. we bought a fire pit and an axe and we split some wood. we played v rising. we ate barbecue and creole breakfast and we cracked jokes and listened to music. it was surreal to be so joyful with him, laughing and playing and joking, in the context of my grandmother's suffering. i didn’t sacrifice our joy for some idea of mourning or respect that precludes dissonance, and the dissonance felt odd.

my grandmother will be dead soon. in a particular moment of pain and lucidity she said to my mother "I just want to go and be with God." soon she will.

I'll go see her today or probably tomorrow and I'll sit with her for a while. I'll give my mom a break so she can get food and make some phone calls. i need to buy new clothes for the funeral. i need to give my grandma a hug. i need to cry for a while because my grandmother will be dead soon and i am struggling to process it.

and here’s a playlist. i have no fucking idea anymore:

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4bUgvWbrZGL2Mb__onCxNhEaKdnLJKzE

mega: https://mega.nz/folder/GQsHVJCZ#n5Q8Sgmc--DcQg6vAgBrfQ

1. Berlioz - free fall

2. Honey Dijon - Climb the Walls (Mixed)

3. Shygirl - f@k€ (feat. KINGDOM)

4. salute - maybe it's u (feat. Sam Gellaitry)

5. Four Tet - Daydream Repeat

6. Kelly Lee Owens - Time To

7. Goat - Frisco Beaver

8. Soccer Mommy - Some Sunny Day

9. Laura Marling - No One's Gonna Love You Like I Can

10. K.O.G - Damiama

11. Nubya Garcia - The Seer

12. Kamasi Washington - The Garden Path

13. Kendrick Lamar - tv off

14. Machinedrum - RESPEK (feat. Topaz Jones & Ezri)

15. DJ Booker & NLE Choppa - Off The Muscle

16. 454 - CASTS OF A DREAMER

17. smokedope2016 - Glock

18. Freddie Gibbs - Walk It Off

19. Ka - Broken Rose Window