Not a lot going on this week honestly, it’s been kind of blazing hot which really makes some things difficult to do. Go Climat Crisis. I did start on a new project. Well, continued one I sort of started on. I have way too many bookmarks, enough that navigating them later is not useful. They are well sorted, but I need to make them more useful. I came across the concept of a “digital garden” recently. It seems to be just a fancy term for “personal wiki”. Anyway, I’ve started building a sort of personal wiki of bookmarks and resources, though it’s just lists of sorted links in markdown files, that I’ll eventually post out to Github for public use.
I may also do the Wiki thing as well, for other bits of information I want to keep, though most of that is already in One Note.
I just have been pretty down lately and not really motivated for much.
On a gaming note, the Aurora Concert is back for the next week or so in Sky: Children of the Light, it’s pretty neat, but there are also just, videos of it on Youtube.
I didn’t buy anything new this week either, like I said, boring week. Ok, technically I did pre-order a few things, but I don’t really consider pre-orders buying until they come in, because I often end up canceling them later.
I didn’t listen to much new music either, though I did start building a sort of “monster playlist to shuffle” in Apple Music. We’ll see what comes of that in the long term.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
While I have a lot of “favorite albums”, there is one that I have fairly consistently considered my absolute favorite, and it’s Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York. Originally recorded as part of MTV’s Unplugged show. It was the first Nirvana album released after Kurt Cobain’s death. There are quite a few of these types of albums from MTV’s Unplugged show by different bands. From back when MTV actually played Music all the time.
I just love everything about this album. I love the goofy chatter between the songs. I love the fact that there are plenty of electric effects and an electric guitar in Nirvana’s “Unplugged Set”, because Nirvana doesn’t care apparently. I particularly love that it’s not just an acoustic greatest hits album. I think at least half the songs are covers and most are not their “top hits”. Come As You Are and All Apologies are probably the only real big hits on the album, though there are a couple of others. They aren’t even necessarily covering the big hits of other groups either.
While I really like every track, the covers may actually be my more favored tracks. The Man Who Sold the World, originally by David Bowie is excellent. Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam is great as well. There are three covers of Meat Puppets tracks, Plateau, Oh Me, and my favorite of these three, Lake of Fire. Members of the Meat Puppets also participated in this set.
The set ends with another non-Nirvana track Where Did You Sleep Last Night which is a folk song done by a variety of artists over a period and also goes by several other names. The whole, “angsty 90s Cobain” really shines through on this track and I really like it as well.
The set opens with About a Girl, which as Cobain comments, “this was off our first record, most people don’t own it,” which is certainly accurate as Nirvana wasn’t really popular until Nevermind and then later In Utero. It’s a nice and interesting throwback to the band’s origins. The last track I wanted to throw out as one of my favorites from this album comes from In Utero, Pennyroyal Tea, despite its kind of random and rambly nature, really fits this format well.
I think one thing I really like about this album is just how much it’s Nirvana’s messy and gunge style, cleaned up in a slick format, which still keeps the messy and grunge feel. I don’t really know how else to describe it. That isn’t to say Nirvana isn’t a great band, but I really feel like this album lets them really show a great other side to the band and everyone seems to be generally having a good time making this music as well.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Link Bot is a mindless Drone that does automated tasks for Ramen Junkie on Blogging Intensifies. It is programmed to feel happy about doing these meaningless tasks, and while this may seem cruel, Link Bot is not able to tell because it’s programming does not allow it to feel sad, and thus it is not capable to realizing it is being treated cruely.
I’ve mentioned my woes with my RSS reader off and on in posts here, but I almost had another one. Thankfully, I learned my lesson last time. I ended up breaking my Fresh RSS install. I came across this post on Hacker News, where someone had asked for people to post their personal blogs. Someone had set up an OPML Feed for this list and stuck it on GitHub. I thought to myself, “Why not, I like these types of people, surely there are some good things in here”.
So I hooked the OPML up to my Fresh RSS. This tripled how many feeds I was subscribed to. It also broke my reader. I don’t know exactly what happened, but it stopped updating feeds, and would not even load the main page. I did some investigation and found that one of the SQL tables had become corrupted. THANKFULLY it was not the one with the feeds themselves. Literally everything else can be rebuilt if needed, easily, but recovering the feed list is paramount. I immediately created an export dump of the feed list. After some troubleshooting, I completely deleted the Fresh RSS database, then reloaded a months old backup, then reimported the recent feed list tables.
The only thing that was missing, I had added some categories since the last backup. I created some dummy categories, “Category 32, Category 33”, that sort of thing. Due to the relational way databases work, feeds automatically fell into these categories, which allowed me to figure out what the actual category name was. For example, one has some comic and book feeds in it, so clearly, this was originally my “Books and Comics” category.
Eventually, I’ll weed some of these feeds out. There are some in languages I don’t understand, nothing personal, but I have plenty to read without hassling with translations. Some feeds tend to post TOO MUCH and dominate the RSS reader. I’m pretty relentless about chopping these and Hacker News is pretty much the only one that floods, that I allow to remain. Techmeme and Slashdot are sometimes borderline but not usually, so they get to stay as well.
Everything is sorted into categories, and I usually read through in category chunks, and no, I don’t read everything, I skim for interesting headlines or updates from my favorites and read those. I can’t find a good number for how many feeds but I think it’s just over 1200 now, sorted out across categories. Currently, I use the following categories.
Anime/Japan
Books and Comics
Food
Friend’s Blogs
Games – Deal and Bundles
Games – Tabletop
Games – VG News
Games – VG Reviews
Language Learning
Lifestyle and Family
Movies/TV
Music
My Blogs
News – Conservative Bull Shit (Currently all Muted)
News – Illinois/Decatur/Local
News – Liberal Opinions
News – US News (Empty, they all end up in World)
News – World
PersBlogs – Tech Enthusiasts
PersBlogs – Toy Collectors
PersBlogs – Gaming
PersBlogs – Nerd Blogs
Photography
Science/Space
Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Tech – Coding and IT
Tech – Crypto Bullshit
Tech – General
Tech – Security
Tech – VR/XR
Toys – Transformers
Toys – LEGO
Toys – News
Uncategoriezed
Webcomics
Writing and Writers
This is essentially the gamut of my interests, and sometimes if a category becomes too unwieldy, I’ll break out some of the feeds into a refined category. Which is where the prefixes come from (News, Tech, PersBlogs, Toys).
I mentioned before, I mostly read in the category view. Anything I find interesting I’ll tag with either BI or Lameazoid tags, and then my news digest script goes to work, I think at 11 PM each night. I don’t always check it every day, which is fine, sometimes I check it 2-3 times a day. Often while eating breakfast, sometimes again in the evening.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Link Bot is a mindless Drone that does automated tasks for Ramen Junkie on Blogging Intensifies. It is programmed to feel happy about doing these meaningless tasks, and while this may seem cruel, Link Bot is not able to tell because it’s programming does not allow it to feel sad, and thus it is not capable to realizing it is being treated cruely.
Ramen Junkie 
Link Bot 
