I usually do a more detailed music post just after the new year based on my Last.fm, which is more reliable, but today is Spotify Wrapped Day, so I figured I’d share them here, for posterity.
Not much surprising here, other than somehow I have two Lauren Mayberry tracks at my top two tracks, and she isn’t in my Top 5 artists list. I am also a bit surprised that Sigrid is still there. I feel like I hardly listen to Sigrid but I seem to, a lot. It’ll be a fun little test on Lauren though because the album drops Friday, finally, and I hope to pic it up.
I don’t know if I will have one of these next year. I dropped my Spotify Plan a week or so ago for financial reasons, and if things stabilize up again, I may use it as an excuse to switch back to Tidal, since Tidal lowered their insane prices. Or maybe I’ll just go back to buying music more often again.
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.
I’ve been doing some experimenting recently making おにぎり (Onigiri) aka, “rice balls”. I’ve been taking it very literally as being a ball and have not added any Nori wrapping yet. I’ve been just sticking with variations of tuna and mayo that I read about online. It’s a pretty simple and easy dish to make, and I end up with enough for 2-3 meals from one batch, which is nice. Cook a cup (uncooked) or rice int he rice maker, dump it in a bowl with a can or two of tuna, spoon some mayo in, add whatever flavoring I want to try out, use an ice cream scoop to drop them onto a plate in “ball form”, and stick them in the fridge for an hour to cool.
Technically speaking, the ball part is kind of optional, but it feels “fancy” and makes them work really well with chopsticks.
Also, prepare for a bunch of images that all mostly look the same!
The first go at it was very basic, literally just tuna, mayo, white rice, and some teriyaki sauce. I didn’t have any soy sauce, so I figured the teriyaki would be close enough. They actually came out pretty tasty.
For Round 2, I invested in some proper soy sauce, and added some garlic to them.
I mixed it up again for round three, sticking with the soy sauce, but this time adding some curry powder to the mix. These were probably my favorite of all the flavors I have tested so far.
My last attempt was much less great.
For the 4th try, I had some Hoisin sauce floating around and decided to see how it would fare. The result wasn’t awful, but it was just kind of flavorless. Like very vaguely sweet maybe. This sauce also gave the rice balls a slightly more gooey consistency, so they didn’t stick together in ball form quite as well, which made them annoying to eat.
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.
Man, talk about both exciting and frustrating all at once. Duolingo launched both a Math and Music course recently, but it was iOS only, initially, and I use Android. It would come eventually though, and it apparently has, and I missed it, or at least, missed the announcement, if there was one. I have been periodically checking and they were not there until fairly recently.
I don’t really have a lot of need or interest in the Math course, but I wasn’t in a good place to try out the music course, so I started off on the Math one for a bit. I am already great at math, I mean, seriously, I have probably done more math than most people have, between school and hobbies and work. But hey, why not.
From what I have done, it’s, kind of weird? It’s all pretty basic Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and fractions so far. But there are often these blocks instead of actual numbers. Which I kind of get is intended to encourage counting, but some of the presentation on the groupings isn’t as consistent as it could be. Plus it just, feels like adding an extra counting step to slow you down. And no, I am not individually counting blocks, I used to count as a job, I can count groups very quickly. Which is also why I noticed the occasional inconsistency that almost felt like it was done purposely as a trip.
Maybe it was.
The real fun part though is that, it’s smart enough to recognize “goofy answers”. Like it has a block of squares to shade, 3/5ths or something. You can shade a random assortment of the 100 squares, just so long as it’s 60 total shaded. Or if it gives you an open ended question like “2/6+1/6”. Sure, you could put 3/6, or 1/2, but it will also take 3987/7974.
But enough math nonsense, my real interest is in the Music course. I really want to learn music, it was one of my “Decade resolutions” in 2020. To be done by 2030. I have really been looking forward to the music course.
And I like it. Even if so far it’s just banging out C, D, and E on the scales. It’s that repetition I want so I can better read sheet music.
But oh my God it’s frustrating as hell to actually do.
And not because it’s hard, but because there is a lot of weird lag and stutter. Every few courses you do a song snipped using notes you know, and so many times I miss a few because it… Just… rand… om… ly… stop…s and… stu… tt…ers…. As it slides along.
At the bare minimum, it’s distracting.
I don’t honestly understand WHY either. I would blame processing power, but I have a decent enough phone that can do other rhythm based games, just fine, often at a much much faster BPM.
I feel like part of the problem is the weird “holding” it sometimes asks for on notes. Like if I could just tap the notes to the beat, everything would run fine, but it often requires these half beat holds, which only exacerbates the stuttering issue since it causes more stutter, and means you can’t just move on and get the next note and try to compensate for the stutter.
It’s just really frustrating. I doubt I go very far in the course as is, as much as I really want to.
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.
Ramen Junkie 
RAMΞNJVNKIΞ🍜 
