Stuff and things
Unlike a lot of things in our modern world where capitalistic consolidation has seemingly taken the power away from folks, HTML still exists. And it's quite possibly cheaper and easier to build stuff than it's ever been. Here's Molly White doing a talk that I found pretty inspirational.
My mom loved to say she hated Kris Kristofferson. We used to go back and forth over that. She'd say he couldn't sing, I'd say it didn't matter because he was more of a writer. He was respected by the greats, not just the singers who sang his songs, but to other renowned writers like Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan. He couldn't really act either, though he probably edged out Willie in that regard.
What a lot of folks are remembering him for right now though, since Sinead O'Connor's death is still fairly fresh, is his defending her when nobody else would. Maybe it's problematic to remember such a fierce feminist with an event like this ("I didn't need a man to rescue me," she later said, though she was indeed shaken). But it's a great way to remember a good ol' boy who — like Willie — often defied stereotypes.
I hate it, but it has to come from somewhere. Sometimes Van Gogh gets blamed for it and maybe that's not without merit.
What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity, or an eccentric and disagreeable man -somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.
All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
This is my ambition, which is, in spite of everything, founded less on anger than on love, more on serenity than on passion.
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven toward these things with an irresistible force.
I guess at least he had the opportunity to achieve that calm and harmony, though he was by most accounts not wealthy or even comfortable. Modern life should afford more of this than the early industrial revolution, but we're spending our technological efforts teaching computers to paint the sunflowers instead of ourselves. Yes, I'm still ranting about that, and shit like this is not gonna make me stop anytime soon.
Also: I think the piece about love vs anger is important: it's lost so often because he's still thought of as "disagreeable."
A year after Billie Eilish justified her baggy clothing by saying she "didn't want people to have access to [her] body, even visually," Chappell Roan is trying to take things a bit further by asserting that her fans don't own her and that she'll just up and quit if they don't back off.
The fact that she's doing this on TikTok starts to get into the complicated nature of what's going on here. When artists and celebrities are on social media sites and talk so directly to their fans as she does, it exacerbates the parasocial feelings that some fans already have, which were probably initiated by the unique and sometimes explicitly confessional aspects of her music and lyrics. But how else to communicate that she is indeed a person and wants to be treated as one? Hard to unravel. it's similar to Eilish's dilemma about sexualization: how to feel positive about people praising her baggy clothes when she feels there's an element of slut-shaming to it?
Of course there are always the commenters and even music writers who'll say that she knew what she was getting into, that this is fame. But fame these days is a different beast, and you're gonna get it from all sides if you're a young woman (from the girls your music is aimed at because you spoke so directly to them, and from men because uhhh we're creeps). Despite being discovered on YouTube, Roan seems like a pop star who belongs in a pre-social-media era, when her stage name could've been the only thing people knew about her. But in the 2020s, Stan isn't even an outlier anymore.
I don't really have a point, not sure I even have an opinion, but I do feel for these young women. Sure, they wanted fame, but for an artist that usually means "sharing the stuff I make with people," not sharing their entire existence.
Tears for Fears is doubling down on using AI for the new live album cover. This is a little disappointing from a band I have a lot of respect and no small amount of love for. Perhaps they think they're not falling into the usual trap because they've paid someone. Never mind that person has scammed them with one of the most typical images on the internet, whether human- or machine-generated. It's likely, given they haven't done a basic image search, that they're just old guys who don't know the state of things. And maybe they really don't care. It's a live album from a legacy act. But call me old fashioned or a commie or whatever, I think artists should support other artists.
The summary of my feelings on LLM-generated "art": There are so many things that machines can do to make our lives easier — and they should be doing them, so humans can be free to make things like art.
Here's my new-ish project SHIVERING at a show a few weeks back. We play few shows so we try to make it decent, with lights and projections and whatnot, since a couple guys pushing buttons and turning knobs isn't the most dynamic and interesting thing to look at.
The beta version of the MPC version 3 software is out, and I can't install it because I have shows and can't rely on beta software to not lose all my shit or crash while playing. But oh man, it looks great. On one hand, it does not dispel the notion that modern MPCs are "DAWs in a box," but it also looks more touch-friendly and visible onstage in many ways.
Unfortunately, one of the coolest things (IMO) about the MPC is how the desktop software is sort of an extension — a bigger interface, a plugin host, etc. And until version 3 of that comes out, I have no idea what the experience is going to be like when using the thing in controller mode.
Still... stoked.
I don't really even know what this means. Font Awesome does seem to be a pretty swell company as these things go, but even if they screw up monumentally, Eleventy being open source means that someone can easily fork the last version that we liked. I will probably continue using Eleventy for the foreseeable future because I like it.
In other news, I added some comments to the blog. I don't know who reads it anymore, but it feels a bit out of touch with anyone who might because it just kind of lives out here on its own. I'm trying out a system called Chirpy, which is hosted but the code is open source and it doesn't have all the really sus junk that comes with Disqus.
I've now been self-hosting some stuff for a while. It started small, with an old not-very-powerful machine and the urge to replace Google.
Easier said than done, right? Well, some of the process of implementing a "homelab" is straightforward and some of it is even easy — but none of it comes without escalation. And my latest, as we moved into a new house, was to implement Unraid on a new machine.
The benefit of Unraid is that it allows you to mix and match as many drive sizes as you want, which to my ears means "you have the ability to fill your bays with whatever crap you have lying around." It maintains what's called parity, and this allows swapping of drives even in situations where RAID arrays might make it difficult. I don't know a ton about this stuff, but I know that it's got a great UI, some best practices for security, and a built-in Docker manager. What it doesn't have, obviously, is a guide for how to make it aesthetic.
The computer is a surprisingly powerful Beelink mini-pc with a 6-core Ryzen processor, and the drives are... again, what I have lying around. I am going to get a taller (8-space) bay to remove all these rando enclosures sitting around, but at the moment it's treating me well. Probably costs enough in power I could be paying Google, but it's the principle. Plus, it's really about control and privacy. Your stuff should be yours.
He was very grand, and super long. Just the kind you want to see when you want to see a dachshund. Pretty much just like Lazlo was in his heyday.
He is gone, though, and that was pretty tough. He had a good run — by the time we had him euthanized in March due to his being senile, in pain, and generally not happy with life anymore, he was at least 16 and probably older. He'd been an exemplary family dog through two small children despite his breed's reputation, and the most excellent snuggler that you could ever hope for. It was the first time a dog had died on my watch since having kids, and you can imagine what that adds to it.
RIP my friend.
