<a href="https://smidgeo.com/notes/deathmtn">deathmtn</a>

3/5/2023, 10:03:09 AM

This episode of Heavy Hole is an interview with Fleshgore from Ukraine. In some ways, they have the same story as every other death metal band that’s lasted two decades. Just years of keeping at it in whatever time they can find outside of day jobs.

But of course, they’re in a country that’s being militarily assaulted. Mostly, they don’t talk about this stuff, but they do mention that they were able to get special permission to leave the country for a small tour. They don’t seem particular well-connected. They’re certainly not rich. They donated the proceeds from this tour to the Ukrainian war effort. But I’d guess that probably amounts to under $1000.

The Ukrainian government is likely very serious about keeping military-age men in the country. But it seems like they’re being…reasonable about it, rather than totalitarian? Amazing.
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3/5/2023, 9:49:18 AM

I stapled a plastic bag to the inside of this cabinet door to contain paper bags. Our home is now improved by 0.0001%.
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3/5/2023, 9:47:18 AM

These grapefruits were really red! I don’t think that means they taste better, though these were pretty good. I am just impressed by the saturation level.
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3/4/2023, 9:07:10 AM

For the first time in several days, I have no back, hip, or leg issues. I don’t even care how old and/or boring this sounds! It is a gr8 day!
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3/3/2023, 8:59:14 PM

I made takeout-style kung pao chicken using instructions from Kenji’s new book, The Wok. The instructions are very detailed, as you would expect, and there’s explanations for why you do things, which is really helpful. Among other differences from typical stir-fry recipes, this one has you add aromatics after doing a first pass on the chicken which keeps them from burning, and it has you add thickener toward the end, in addition to including cornstarch in the marinade. It also does not burn and get chunked up into wads early this way.

The flavor balance is good, and it has the thickness you’d expect. It felt like more work, though, but it was worth it.
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3/3/2023, 2:21:52 PM

The web is filling up with ML-generated nonsense web pages that you have to read for 20 seconds to realize that it is just nonsense that has tricked Duck Duck Go and Google into delivering you into it.

I've already stopped searching for answers to basic home improvement questions or product questions on search engines and instead see if people in a friend Slack know it. I do this with some tech questions, even. Ten years ago, seeing these questions asked by someone else would make me tap a sign that said "just Google it".
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3/3/2023, 12:38:47 PM

I just got a huge cardboard box that has been in our basement since January out of the house. Feels so good, as Chuck Mangione might say.
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3/3/2023, 10:01:07 AM

Today's Bandcamp Friday gets:

Louie Zong discography. He asked for $1? I never know what to do about that. I paid $5. It's a lot of music, and in addition to having *just* the right touch on everything, he consistently walks the line between chill and having some heart in his stuff.

His latest album is dead-on Italo disco arrangements of Mario themes.

Passages into Deformity. I think I've absorbed enough of Dharmata and the Sanguinary Impetus and am ready to absorb more lively and abundant brutality from Defeated Sanity.

Plantasia on tape! It is a weird synth classic from the '70s that has a feel very much like video game music and dungeon synth, which came much later.
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3/3/2023, 8:50:40 AM

I’m going to admit this is a tenuous connection.
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3/2/2023, 9:46:19 PM

Was gonna work on some D&D stuff on the compute, but finding I have computer fatigue. I guess I gotta prep old fashioned style. By which I mean e-ink tablet.
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3/2/2023, 6:48:45 PM

I've tried reading parts of MetaFilter that aren't Projects and Music again. The commenters there still seem dumb and backward.

There's a thread about the term JPRG being used to box things in (and back in the '00s, CRPG fans absolutely used it to refer to games they thought were childish and lacking in manly tacticalness). There was a lot of, oh, Japanese game developers don't want the term to be used to describe their games, but we'll keep using it anyway. I felt like a loser for even looking.
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3/2/2023, 2:34:03 PM

Twelve pull-ups.

Yesterday, I hauled my extremely heavy ergonomic chair up because I don’t think I’ll be working in the basement until it gets to 60°F down there. I hoped it would help with the hip flexor situation, but results are inconclusive so far.
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3/2/2023, 12:40:24 PM

The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era

Unhinged bolding and emojis in that post, but:
I don’t think most React developers are making any trade-offs. I don’t think most React developers have evaluated shit! They use React because they’ve been told they need to use React, and so they use React.
This absolutely is what happened. I've interview so many candidates that just use it so they can get a job.
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3/2/2023, 11:57:44 AM

Someone on a Slack posted a recent Megadeth live performance in which Marty Friedman joined them. (Both the very first riff with the harmonics and the start of the Marty's solo sound off, but that's beside the point.)

He mentioned So Far So Good…So What?, and it just occurred to me how that album is still striking in that it this really unhappy vibe that's still kind of unsettling. Not unhappy in the metal lyrical topic sense, but when I heard it, even for the first time, there's this underlying feeling that there's something wrong with the people playing the music.

For me, neither Peace Sells nor Rust in Peace create that sense — no matter how dark things are melodically or lyrically, there's an exuberance and brightness driving it. Everything in So Far So Good…So What? is on time and very technical, but has this "dying smoker" vibe.
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3/2/2023, 10:39:27 AM

on both Hirschfeld’s 1933 book Men and Women: The World Journey of a Sexology about his world tour, as well as his more controversial book Racism, about racism and his theory of the races, which was published posthumously in 1938.
Wow, that title.

Anyway, history is complex.
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3/2/2023, 12:44:13 AM

I made some progress on my roguelike boilerplate. SVGs be rendering. And I think that's all I can do until Sunday or so.
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3/1/2023, 10:06:08 PM

Very consistently, the guy laughs OL while reading books.

None of my books are that good. I need books like that for me.
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3/1/2023, 9:40:01 PM

These pages of the Lao Tzu are an illustration of the nature of a work that’s been edited by many people over a long period of time.

But mostly I’m interested in how many footnote symbols were used. Five, including ||! It’s like a Wingding party. They couldn’t use numbers because those are reserved for endnotes.
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3/1/2023, 4:24:04 PM

If a chill game is being played, it’s not the worst to be working while it’s playing.
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2/28/2023, 10:15:22 PM

I thought I was going to have do some sophisticated editing with Bitwig, but I just went into NanoStudio and non-smart deleted some audio, and there were no noticeable artifacts. Sometimes you can deleted chunks of wav files, and it’s fine!

Also, I allowed myself to not come up with a bass part for it. I’m pro-bass for metal-style songs, but I’m not going to come up with anything good, so I’ll just leave more space for the kick drum.
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2/28/2023, 8:09:16 PM

The most interesting thing about the Diary of the Wimpy Kid animated movie is the varying levels of detail. The characters are smooth and round, and the trees are highly articulated renderings in which you can see every leaf. The plates of pasta were fascinating to me. They were all textured cylinders and spheres.
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2/28/2023, 7:27:46 PM

For whatever reason, I didn’t get around to trying ChatGPT until now. And I’m surprised that it doesn’t really feel that different from GPT-2. Microsoft paid a billion for this!
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2/28/2023, 4:51:33 PM

Twelve pull-ups. Really needed a break. The game engine progress has not been great, but there is Some.
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2/28/2023, 2:36:41 PM

There's this gross guitar collector culture that's been around quite a while. It's not uncommon for people in this culture to view electronic musicians as "not real". At the same time, a lot of guitar collectors (or would-be guitar collectors) don't play at much at all, which puts them in a proverbial glass house. Instead, they spend time scrolling through Instagram and the like looking at pictures of "nice" guitars.

Sadly, I think modular synths have grown a bit of a parallel culture in electronic music.

Is it unfair to condemn this shopping culture if it brings the participants joy? I think no because they're deceptive and present themselves as musicians or at least "serious music people" in order to obtain higher status than people who just like to buy nice clothes. And the nice clothes are often more functional than these extra guitars people are buying or ogling.
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2/28/2023, 7:52:27 AM

Clean code, horrible performance.

The performance part is actually not going to matter in anything I’m working on, but I do agree with this:
This is actually one of the reasons that — unlike “clean” code advocates — I think switch statements are great! They make this kind of pattern very easy to see. When your code is organized by operation, rather than by type, it’s straightforward to observe and pull out common patterns. By contrast, if you were to look back at the class version, you would probably never notice this kind of pattern because not only is there a lot more boilerplate in the way, but “clean” code advocates recommend putting each class in a separate file, making it even less likely you’ll ever notice something like this.
There’s quite a few abstraction practices that look clean, but in practice, make things harder to understand.
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