Hmm. Korean kids have recently started saying "skibidi". Meaning it's probably old hat by now. Old hat... that's how old I am...

I haven't been back to Reddit since the first day of protests.

Not gonna lie though, I miss it. The niche stuff I went to Reddit for in the first place came here during the drama, but despite an initial push to get some replacement communities going here, they've gone almost completely inactive now.

It's not really just Spotify. I'm a hobbyist music producer. I uploaded my entire catalog through Distrokid about two years ago. Distrokid serves just about every streaming service. It costs $20 a year for the most basic package. I've got ~8 million listens according to Distrokid, and that nets me about $40 US. So, I made my money back. Not bad for 20 years of work. Haha!

I don't really care about the numbers, like I said, I'm a hobbyist. I make music because I enjoy making music. It would never be my career unless I dropped everything and struck out touring trying to make it in an industry that traditionally chews up and spits out hopefuls. I'm not exactly the age or attractiveness that most people expect in a touring musician, either.

In the 90s, anything bad was "retarded" or "gay". Those don't really fly anymore.

A couple years ago, I ended up in an ambulance due to what turned out to be a small urethra stone. At the hospital, I had an x-ray. When that didn't find the problem, they gave me a CT scan. Once they found the stone, they called in a urologist. I got a consultation, prescription, passed the stone later that day (it was tiny), and recovered very quickly. My total bill was 243'000 Korean won - just about $200 USD. I only had the mandatory insurance that was paid for by my employer. Something to the tune of $50 a month that they are legally required to pay.

The US's system is completely fucked. Broken beyond repair. I wish them luck.

You want to wreck someone at hangman? Choose "jazz". Getting "A" as the second letter is no help at all, and "J" and "Z" are the last letters anyone guesses.

An ex and I were on an hour-long bus trip to the next city over where we lived in Korea. The subject of there being a subway in said city came up, and I insisted there was not. She insisted that she saw one there once. I further insisted that there was no way the city was big enough to have a subway. It got quite heated. Anger. Hurt feelings.

She was talking about the sandwich restaurant, I was talking about underground trains. We were both right.

I know this will sound pretentious as fuck, but as someone who got a physics degree and knows some shit, BBT drives me fucking nuts with its relentless pandering. Nerd culture isn't even nerdy anymore since being a nerd implies being some kind of outcast. When the outcasts become the majority, they're no longer outcast.

Gimme old Star Trek episodes for comfort TV any day.

Frankly, I'd stop using YouTube entirely before I'd start using it without an adblocker. At least there are no signs of it slowing down for me, yet.

They did on one flight I was on. You could choose from a number of different cameras around the plane and watch the view. Short of take-off and landing, it was pretty dull.

Do you like synthesizers? My synthesizer community is mostly me talking to myself about them. !synthesizers@lemm.ee

Is a declining birth rate a bad thing? 50 million people live in a country (South Korea) the size of Indiana. Maybe, just maybe the economy should just take a hit for a change so there can be fewer people here. I know rich people don't want that, but I bet the country would be a better place for it.

I was up for a Steam competitor. I signed up for the Epic store a few years back. Tried to get the first free game. It wasn't available in my region despite being plastered all over the store in my region. The exact same thing happened the next month. Both of those games were available on Steam in my region at some pretty low prices by then.

Then, Epic started paying for exclusivity, making games not available in my region at all. I had at least deleted their stupid app by then anyway. Fuck Epic entirely.

Godot is awesome. I hope all the attention that has been spewed upon them thanks to Unity's fuck up doesn't spoil it.

Eventually every chat gpt request will just be answered with, "I too choose this guy's dead wife."

Ehh. What's the average age around here? I'm guessing it wasn't the youth that migrated from Reddit.

Never thought I'd take the side of an insurance company.

Supply and demand, right? Surely they'll get cheaper, right?

It never left. My MP3 collection is getting kinda disgusting at this point. I really should delete a bunch of it, but you never know when I'm going to want to listen to that album I downloaded 15 years ago and haven't gotten into yet!

To be fair, so has science. Which also to be fair is because of real life evidence, not whatever passes for evidence to the religious.

While I also feel like the past is better left in the past, I am certainly not above a little schadenfreude, either.

Daft Punk weren't really very good songwriters, but they made up for it by being fantastic producers.

It was only 13 years ago that the FDA changed its stance on BPA from "safe" to "some concern".

Buncha wimps. Spiders are not out to get you. In fact, they're out to get far more annoying insects like mosquitoes and houseflies. Do you know how many diseases those two spread? Do you know how many spiders spread? Spiders are your friends!

r/spiderbro is one of my most missed subreddits.

Imma go blow some Chechnyan minds with my happy hardcore outfit that plays songs at 100bpm, but only plays 64th notes.

History can't sue you into oblivion for copyright infringement.

So many bedroom audio producers are all about having the latest and greatest gear, and then don't make shit beyond a tech demo or two. There's nothing wrong with that I suppose. It just seems a bit odd to me to collect a pile of expensive, useful tools, and then not even use them.

Or not even know how to use them. I remember one guy in particular. He had a $10000 Moog One, and used it to make a piece of music where he held an A minor chord for 20 minutes. There was almost no modulation or movement at all. Just the same chord for twenty minutes. I like outre music, but come on!

I make music, but it's not really music anyone would want to put on at a party, so I don't tell anyone about it. There's nothing more awkward than standing there trying to explain to someone that what they're listening to is a chord progression played with each note slightly out of phase such that rather than distinct chord changes, you just get an overall impression of it as time progresses while they screw up their face in confusion and disgust. Not that everything I make is a conceptual experiment, but that's inevitably what someone will put on if they discover my music.

Have you played Baldur's Gate 1 recently? 2E is a nightmare of THACO and instant death waiting around every corner. Weapons break constantly, mages inevitably hold your entire party, it's very easy to wander off in the wrong direction and die, NPCs have wonky stats that cannot be respecced. Save scumming is mandatory unless you really, really know your stuff.

The writing is still amazing, though.

BG3 does not feel like it came out in 1998.

My favorite part of the satanic panic was when sometime in the eighties, our local preacher dropped by our house (we were not church goers) and saw a mangled, black candle on our kitchen table. We'd had a power outage recently, and Internet-less, kid-me loved to heat up paper clips over the flames and use them to etch the wax. Totally innocent of any dastardly doings aside from slightly mischievous me. He left in a bit of a hurry and sent along some hilarious VHS tapes decrying the evils of this and that. Particularly Dungeons and Dragons. Which was how I discovered Dungeons and Dragons and how awesome it is.

Yes. I'm using the same search methods I've always used that used to get me relevant results, and I get a bunch of fucking sponsored links instead. I've noticed lately that if the result of a search is a YouTube video and I click on it, it doesn't go to YouTube but opens up as a search result and plays me ads somehow bypassing my adblocker that works just fine in actual YouTube. More than once after the ad was done, the video refused to load, which was utterly infuriating.

Google assistant on my phone has also become garbage. They changed the functionality of the few key things I liked to use, and now it's totally useless to me. Google is swirling down the shitter faster than yesterdays tacos. Honestly, if it wasn't for email, photos, and using an Android phone, I'd probably be done with them entirely.

I finally just started playing. I'm 50 hours in and nowhere near done with it. Don't tell me there's more coming!

More time off to take care of the fourteen children you need to have to keep your farm going.

The original You Are My Sunshine had something ridiculous like 48 verses many of which have been lost and it went on for twelve minutes. Though I forget where I read that, and I can't find it again, so it may have been some kind of weird fever dream.

I was coding Indie games when it came out. The number of clones in the community was just disgusting. There was even more than one Flappy Game Jam. If Flappy Bird can be credited with one thing, it's that it made a whole bunch of inept coders think that they too could get rich by making super simple mobile games.

If they'd just be smart about it. Make the ads in-game. Like a Nike poster on a wall or a can of Pepsi on a table or something. I wouldn't have a problem with that. Making them the entire focus - however brief - just makes me hate them immeasurably.

Fantastic food. Entirely too rapey.

My headphone pads on a pair of Sony MD7506 were fraying apart, so I bought a pair of $3 replacement pads online. While I was buying those, I noticed a nice looking $30 pair made of sheepskin leather. I bought those, too and figured I'd just use the $3 pair until they inevitably wore out, and then switch to the nice ones. Well, it's been some time now and the $3 pair are apparently far more robust than their forebears. The sheepskin remain in their packaging untouched. One day..

Not for everyone obviously, but I developed a synthesizer habit some years ago, and right now is probably the best time ever for a beginner to get into it. Korg's Volca series, Roland's Aira compact, teenage engineering's Pocket Operators, Arturia's Microfreak, and Elektron's Model series are all affordable and a great way for a beginner to start making some cool-ass music. Beware developing a habit though. It only stays affordable so long.

Doesn't less demand mean cheaper gas? That sure hasn't happened here.