Listening Habits

My Music Listening Habits for 2023

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It’s that time again, when I discuss my music habits for the year, or at least, parts of it that seem interesting, to me. I’ll just start off with the 5×5 chart, from my Last.fm scrobbles. I had some Spotify Wrapped stuff too but it doesn’t capture everything and was only for like 3 months of listening, so it’s kind of worthless.

So, a bit of an interesting surprise, Wolf Alice’s Blue Weekend was my top album for the year. I guess I was listening to that one a lot more than I really thought I had been. The same goes for Paramore’s This is Why. This is Why is kind of in there twice too, because they put out a second version where every track was done or remixed by an artist that was not Paramore.

I’m also a bit surprised how high Aurora’s The Gods We Can Touch ranked, at number three. I’ve always kind of considered it my least favorite of Aurora’s four albums. In less surprising areas are Hot Mess from Dodie and CHVRCHES, The Bones of What You Believe. Bones is definitely from the tenth-anniversary release. Hot Mess actually shows up twice, probably because before Spotify I was listening to the copy I made off the Vinyl version I own, which was tagged as Hot Mess (RSD Vinyl).

Related to CHVRCHES is Lauren Mayberry, with a single. Shame is one song, and it’s number 6. The album I believe is supposed to drop sometime in January, and I can almost guarantee it will be in a top spot for next year’s wrap-up, if not at number one.

Things get a bit more interesting later in the list here outside the top ten reliable when we get into the whole “potential usurpers” area. At number 14 is Ben Fold’s latest album, What Matters Most. Ben Folds has become a bit of a weird piece in my music listening. I’m not entirely sure I am super into his music, though it’s all pretty enjoyable. But I find Ben Folds as a person really interesting. I’ve been watching a bunch of his interviews on YouTube where he talks to all sorts of creative types and talks about the music-making process and it’s all very fascinating. My last real exposure to Ben Folds was way back in High School when Ben Folds Five and Brick were on the radio all the time. I don’t really being super into that song either, I was a lot more into rock and alternative in that time period. I’ve recently signed up for his soon to be ended Patreon, so I can snag the archive content and give it a listen.

At number 15 right after is Fizz with The Secret to Life. Fizz is a sort of super band collaboration between Dodie, Orla Garland and a couple of others that I had not really listened to previously. As much as I really like Orla and Dodie, I slept on this album because I just found the acid trip aesthetics of it to be really off-putting. But I decided I really should at least give it a try and it’s really good. Like super great good. I wish I had started listening sooner.

The last couple I want to point out here, feel a bit related. Let’s start with Raffaella, at number 20, with Live Raff Love (Act I). It’s technically an EP I think, I never really got the distinction honestly aside from EPs have less tracks. Anyway, Raff has been a consistent mainstay in my library since first hearing about her back in 2019 when I went to see Sigrid. Live Raff Love (Act II) I believe is slated for January, and I’m looking forward to it.

Like Raff, I want to mention Claud, to which I was pretty much introduced in a similar way, Claud was one of the acts performing at the little festival thing where I saw Lauren Mayberry’s solo show. Like Raff, I listened to a bunch of their music before the actual show and enjoyed it, and I enjoy it even more after watching them perform live. I am pretty sure at least half my plays on that Paramore remix of This is Why, is Claud’s rendition of Crave.

Which leads me to my usual predictions for next year. Claud and Raff will likely rank up there. Lauren will probably top the list. Sigrid I think has a new album in the works and has been making a bit of a come back in my listening this year, so I am predicting she will be pretty high. Fizz will probably be around, I’m not sure they will go much higher though after a whole year. Ben Folds will probably remain, though I doubt he will break the top ten. The only one on the list above I can say probably won’t return is Maisie Peters. I enjoy her music, but I don’t really know how to describe it, but I don’t really like her. Seems a bit too bitchy in a sort of “I think I’m better than everyone” sort of way.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (12.17.2023 to 12.23.2023)

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It’s that time of year again, when everyone is cheerful and celebrating and partying and buying gifts. That’s right, it’s my birthday. And these days, there isn’t a lot of partying or buying gifts. Which isn’t really a big deal. I have long gotten to the age when I really don’t care much for all of that.

It’s always kind of been a sort of, blessing and a curse having a birthday this time of year. On one hand, you end up being around more family more often so you end up with more “token gifts”. Often you at least get like, a cake or something, as a secondary dessert to whatever party was already occuring. It also just gets overshadowed by this other dude’s birthday.

It’s also just more meaningful when you are young, like I said, these days that doesn’t matter much these days. It’s just another year, another day. I am not even that old yet, though all things considered, I am likely on the downturn of “halfway”. I should probably buy a motorcycle or a fishing boat or go skydiving or something…

Mortality is kind of weird. I am not sure I really want to think about all that at the moment.

Anyway…

It’s going to be weird at work in about a week. We don’t really take any trips or anything and so back in like, September or October, I started doing math with my vacation days and found that I had a LOT of them. I have not worked a full 5 day work week in months. I only worked 3 days this week and will only work 2 next week. But starting next year, it’s back to normal.

I have also signed up for this CCNA course through work, so for the first few weeks, I get to work, then come home and do like 5 hours of virtual training each night. Its not paid time, which is fine, the cost is covered though. One of the nice sort of perks through work is that I get access to a few paid training deals, and we are allowed to do the training out of hours if we want.

I am almost always trying to learn something new. I almost always have at least one online course that I am periodically working on. Currently, I am doing a Javascript course, a C# Course I have kind of abandoned, a Godot4 course which has been fun, making cheesy little games, and more recently an AI/Machine Learning course.

There is also my constant Duolingo learning as well. I gave up on Norwegian for now. And Spanish was getting boring again. I wanted to try the new Music course Duo is rolling out but it’s iOS only for now. So I picked up my third planned language, Japanese.

I feel like, Duo’s Japanese course, is not super great, if you know nothing about Japanese. Fortunately, I have picked it up pretty quickly because I studied Japanese back in High School. It’s been over 25 years and I don’t remember a lot of it, but it’s coming back and it has helped me breeze through learning the Katakana and Kanji, and I was already familiar with the basic sentence structure concepts. Duo is full of new concepts and words though, since early parts of Duo courses are definitely geared towards “I am going to be a tourist”. My High School learning was more, “I am learning the language.”

Speaking of Japanese, last Sunday, I went and saw Godzilla Minus One. It’s fantastic, I recommend seeing it. I am looking forward to going to the black-and-white version that was recently announced. It has a lot of feel of the older Godzilla films, without being quite as cheesy “guy in a rubber suit and cardboard buildings,” to it. It also isn’t all “action drama” like the US-made Legendary films Godzilla. Though I really like the Legendary movies and that version a lot. Godzilla is really terrifying in it, for not really being the main focus of the film.

Anyway, time to wrap up, I hope to do the usual bloggy thing of some yearly wrap-up posts soon. Also, I did not forget about Advent of Code, I just didn’t do it this year.

Have a Happy Birthday to all.

No wait, that’s not right…

Happy Festivus!

Other Photos

2023 Decatur Downtown Postcard Signs

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Every year the city has around 20 or so giant postcards laid out downtown around a little park. Every year I try to take a walk down there and take some photos of the ones I find interesting for one reason or another. They are numbered, I think maybe there is some voting involved. I have never voted. They are created by local businesses and groups.

I just thought this one looked nice. It’s from the Staley Museum. Named for A.E. Staley, who was the founder of A.E. Staley Manufacturing. There are several things named for him in the city here, the large Staley Building down of Eldorado, the museum, Stayley Credit union, probably others. Decatur is very big on Agriculture and the Stayley business was making corn starch.

One of the local animal shelters put this one out. I thought the animals were cute. I am not sure I’ve ever been there, we do kitten fostering sometimes, but we do it through the County Animal Shelter.

I have no idea who sponsored this one, but hey, who doesn’t love dragons.

This one is from the Children’s Museum of Illinois, which is here in town. With its Nutcracker themed art that’s pretty nice. Nice aside from the almost unfortunately placement of that rat tail. I thought at first the dancer had a weird tentacle leg.

Not a lot of them have 3D elements, and I thought the stained glass effect was nice. It is from Holy Family Parish & Schools, which I assume is a church.

Theater 7 is a local theater group. I’ve been to a few of their shows and one of their members used to be a coworker when I worked at the TV station. This one is advertising their upcoming A Christmas Story Musical. Which we’re going to see in a week or so.

I’m not sure who sponsored this one but that old bus terminal pictured there is the centerpiece of the central park and appears in a lot of Decatur themed iconography.

Another mystery sponsor, but I like penguins a lot, so it’s secretly my favorite.

File this one under, “It’s kind of jankey looking but it’s clear that someone put some effort into it and thought they were doing pretty good so I guess it’s alright.” I’m kind of a sucker for that sort of thing.

I don’t know what Dennis Lab School is, but I thought this one was nice.

This one is a little basic, but that centerpiece is a proper fancy 3D piece which makes it look pretty cool.

The last one that I took a photo of, there were a few others that I did not photograph. I actually skipped this one until I realize that it had the “Bikini Tree” in it. When I do my walking in the park, I walk by this tree. I have no idea who keeps painting it but it has new colors all the time (it has Ukraine colors though for over year I think). I imagine it’s someone from the nearby college.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (11.19.2023 to 11.25.2023)

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Oh look, I fell into the “Trap of Not”. I am pretty sure I mentioned it before. It’s just a little phrase I think about sometimes when I want to do something but I just, do not. Specifically, in this case, writing and blogging. Like these little Saturday write-ups, I wanted to at least keep up with them, but I ended up, well, not. I also feel stupid jealous of people who blog and write regularly right now.

Look at Cynni’s Blog here, she writes daily. Long detailed posts, daily, with her dog and her little neat cartoon images spiced in. I’m jealous of that. My excuse is often that I don’t have the time, but the reality is, I kind of DO have the time. I just keep falling into Not. Another one that I’d love to be more like with Lameazoid is The Figure in Question. Not so much daily reviews, just more a long daily catalog of “here is this figure and this is why I like it.”

A while back I picked up this massive ball of blogs from a Hacker News posts. I’m still, still going through them, months later. There are so many that seem to have died for one reason or another. I mean, writing regularly, or even semi-regularly I suppose, is not for everyone. The process of going through them is slow, but there has been a fun accidental mechanism in my RSS reader that has helped. Basically, the feeds never update all at once. I get maybe 10-15 new ones showing up daily, but I think it’s timing out otherwise. So I skim through the ones that do show up and see if any of them are interesting, if not, I dump them. If they are interesting I throw them in a new category to better look at later, or if they have an obvious theme, I categorize them accordingly, since it’s Hacker News, it’s MOSTLY “Personal Blogs – Tech Enthusiasts”.

It’s also weird how some of these people organize their blog titles. Some people give useful information, and some just have these weird one-word titles that feel completely meaningless. Some of these blogs seemed completely themed around some extremely obscure tech topic (I usually drop these). You can tell when someone started a blog because they picked up some goofy random new coding language. Most of these I find, are also dead blogs. I guess they got tired of the topic or didn’t find an audience or something.

I always tell myself I don’t care about having an audience, and I keep plugging away at it anyway. For decades now. It’s a little crazy maybe. And I just write whatever comes to mind. I’ve been sitting here for an hour or two, having eaten my breakfast, done some daily quests in Sky, and browsed my RSS reader. Everyone else in the house is still asleep except the cats, so it’s nice and quiet. Anyway, I tell myself I don’t care about an audience, but also I don’t understand why everything seems to go nowhere.

Which brings up some of my activities this week. Working a bit to better understand the whole Search Engine Search Console thing. I set up a plug-in to give both blogs a mobile theme because I know Google complains about that. It’s boring and ugly, it gets the job done, I guess. I also have no idea why some of the issues listed are simply, “Page discovered but not indexed”. Like, ok, that’s on you, why are you not indexing them? No other explanations were given. I’ve also found it wants to index pages for individual images and such.

Which is another thing I should do. I need to flip through the gallery adding alt text to images. For accessibility. I am all for accessibility, but honestly, most of the images, don’t super matter or are meaningless if you can’t see them. Sorry people with bad or no sight, it sucks I am sure, but me describing a random concert photo, is not going to help you get the feeling of the photo. Most other images amount to something basic, “Python Logo”, “XXXXX Album cover.” You are not missing anything not seeing it. I think there is actually a way to get screen readers to ignore those images. A picture is worth a thousand words, and those thousand words already exist in the Blog Post the picture is in. There is one blog I read in my RSS reader with a dude who is absolutely obsessed with alt text. Like, it’s literally probably something he should see a shrink or something over because when I write obsessed, I mean OBSESSED. If I were a person who needed alt texts, I would be upset with how wordy and insanely long this dude makes his alt texts.

Other fun this week, it is, of course, Thanksgiving. We went to my parent’s house and had a very basic turkey, potatoes, corn, and green beans, style Thanksgiving dinner. My brother and his family were busy. It was enjoyable.

Side note, I typo-ed the word green. Are you OK there Spell Check? The obvious word is not there at all.

I’ve decided to dump the whole “What I Got” part of these. I might do the toys and games stuff on Lameazoid if I ever started regularly posting there again, but I did want to throw in that I bought some more memory for my gaming PC. It came with 16GB, which is decent, but I’ve been doing some AI stuff and I may move my Video Editing to that PC from my old PC, so I added another 32GB of RAM. Total of 48 now, which is probably a bit excessive. Nothing fancy, I was looking at fancy but realized that it wouldn’t do any good because it’s just going to clock down to match the speeds of the current 16GB, which was plenty fast enough already.

Music

Calibrating My Audio-Technica AT-LP60

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I don’t have a ton of vinyl records, but I do like to actually listen to them. It’s a topic for its own entire post, but I don’t collect anything for its “value”. I collect because I want to enjoy it. I point this out a bit because I also have a shitload of toys. I noticed something recently, that I am surprised I didn’t notice before, or maybe it just, didn’t actually click that it was an issue. Last week I got 1989 (Taylor’s Version). While listening to that, everything seemed, slightly too fast. I think I may have noticed this a bit with my Bone’s 10th vinyl as well. In the case of the Taylor Swift album, I decided it was just something to do with it being a re-recorded album, and not a straight remaster/release.

More recently, I got my copy of Aurora’s All My Demons… (Commentary here)…

Because I started hardcore tracking my listening with Last.fm years ago, I can say, with confidence, that I have listened to this album a lot. I can’t say it’s my most listened to album of all time for sure, but I can say, it’s the top since I started tracking. When listening to it, things were definitely off. The whole thing was running slightly too fast, and Aurora’s wonderful vocals sounded weird.

My first thought was, that maybe the belt was wearing out. It also occurred to me, that it’s a belt, it probably has a tension adjustment somewhere. I looked up a copy of the manual, which didn’t mention it anywhere. But, various audio forums did mention it. On the bottom of the players, are two small holes, where a screwdriver can be inserted and the tension adjusted, altering the rotation speed.

The problem then was, how to know if the speed was right. I probably could have done it by ear with All My Demons, but the adjustment is on the bottom, I can’t adjust it while it’s playing (well, not easily). It turns out, there are technical ways to do this as well. One of the search results mentioned a printable strobe guide. I’m not positive what this is, but I can infer based on other things I know of. I suspect it works like a Zeotrope, where you get a sort of animation going when the record spins at the proper speed.

Another result suggested an app called RPM Speed and Wow. As the name suggests, it uses a phone’s accelerometer to measure the RPM and Wow of a turn table. I’m not entirely sure what Wow is, it seems to be related to audio distortion, I may look into that later a bit more. For now, the concern was the speed. I loaded up the app, placed the phone on the turn table, pressed the “pause” button on the player, which prevents the arm from dropping, but not the table from spinning, and pressed play. After about a minute, I had a measurement of 34.99 RPM, almost 5% off.

Suddenly it makes sense why all the music seemed too fast, because it was!

I dug out a small screw driver and carefully lifted the player up to turn the knob. One issue was that I wasn’t sure which direction to go. I went with clockwise (Spoilers, the correct direction is counter clockwise). I tested again, but it didn’t change. I tried counter clockwise, no real change. So I went and got an even smaller screwdriver.

Left Screwdriver was too large to fit, the right was needed.

It takes a very small screwdriver to get in the hole properly to adjust the knob. Also, it takes a very very very small amount of turn to adjust the speed. The best way I can describe it, I needed a 5% change, which pretty much meant a 5% turn out of a whole circle. I doubt it’s actually that exact, but it’s very very slight.

Anyway, after going Clockwise, things got faster, so I lifted things up and went counter-clockwise until I landed on 33.12 RPM. This is around half a percent too slow, which frankly, is close enough. Probably as close as I am going to get without seriously altering my methods. For one thing, during at least one tip to adjust, the turntable itself fell off, so I had to put it and the belt back on, which probably screws up these small adjustments I’m making as more than half a percent.

I put my All My Demons record back on the turn table and fired it up, and it was better, much much better, enough that it wasn’t noticeably off.

Just as a quick wrap up, I want to give a shout out to this Matco screwdriver set. A friend of mine in High School gave this set to me for my birthday, I think my 16th. His dad worked for Matco and there were a ton of Matco tools in his house. Anyway, it’s served me well, repeatedly, for over 25 years now. It’s a super useful set of screwdrivers (the pen not so much, I’ve never used the pen).

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