deathmtn

Dickens named a character "Wackford Squeers." The only thing that can top "Squeers" is "Wackford".

This was nearly 200 years before generators like this!

I initially moved to Boston to work at a company called the Voter Activation Network that handled campaign data for Democratic campaigns. That company was a mess, technically and organizationally, and I left after a year.

Since then, they’ve been bought by NGP. Just recently I found out that they had layoffs because of an acquisition. But I didn’t know who the acquirer was. It’s private equity.

As terrible as their software is, no one else has bothered to build the same data warehousing service they have. So, this could mean serious trouble for Democrats in 2024.

Well, once again, due to an economic system that incentivizes building organizations primarily to sell them rather than to provide value to lots of people, we are now once again facing the possibility of this being the last few the Bandcamp Fridays. Is Songtradr, a company that makes money by licensing music for use in videos and commercial situations, going to be motivated to keep running an event that does not make them money? I would guess no.

Today, my purchase are kind of conservative. I got things I meant to get for a while.

Cavalry in Thousands, Tengger Cavalry. I actually think the original, non re-recorded version is better, but have no idea how to get that. This one is still good, though! Good riffs, throat singing, morin khuur, cool flutes once in a whlie. Lots of horse spirit. RIP, Nature G.

Gorguts, Colored Sands. I can't say enough how hard it is to be dissonant and come across like you make sense. I think this album also sounds really refined, which isn't good or bad, but interesting.

Behold the Arctopus, Hapeleptic Overtrove. ("Hapeleptics" and "Overtrove" are not real word, BTW. I checked!) This is the first album in which they have various kinds of percussion instead of a drum kit. I think this could be the first metal album that does that, possibly. It's really refreshing.

Awadgin Pratt, Stillpoint. I think piano allows dissonance and/or complex chords to get over a little more easily than guitars or anything else does. That's why Sun Ra's piano album is easier to get into than his Arkestra stuff for me. But this album is mostly not any more dissonant than any other "new music" (contemporary classical). I've been more piano-aware lately because of the guy's playing, and I now have a craving for melodically adventurous piano now and then.

Castlevania III. Kirby Pufocia (one of the guitarists in Metroid Metal) meticulously edited the American and Japanese versions of this soundtrack. (The Japanese version was able to use extra channels.) Some of the differences are explained here. Generally, the Japanese version is more articulate, but there are a few parts in the US version that aren't in the Japanese version as well. And if you played the US version as a child, then the US timbre are more familiar. I think the most valuable thing he did was mix and level for nice regular listening, though.

Huh, given a universe of infinite size, it’s statistically more likely for a Boltzmann brain (one formed by loose particles randomly converging that thinks it’s a traditional brain) to exist than a brain that came about via evolution.

Windowkill is extremely clever.

Well, our AC broke.

Heh, just after writing that, I saw a work email that made me think, oh man I gotta get out of this.

I've been thinking about the framing of being trapped lately. I started thinking about it because of the tech downturn. A couple years ago, there were lots of chances to change jobs if you were a software engineer. Now the executive class has decided you can't. If you're in a bad spot after the carousel has stopped, you're probably going to be there for a while.

This framing is not inaccurate. We can't say it's not true.

However, I think it feels worse if you're not aware of it. If you are trapped but don't really think about it, it's rough. You get the bad feeling of being trapped without being able to move on. It's just "I feel trapped!" over and over again. If you say "I am trapped", maybe you get to move on to whatever mental state prisoners get to after the first few years of prison.