busybee fluffy rambles

Novembeat

Novembeat is in full swing, and I love seeing people post what they’re working on. Hopefully more of it gets submitted to the site.

Most of the conversation I see for it is on the Red Means Recording Patreon discord but of course there’s a channel dedicated to it over on my Discord as well. I’d love to see more participants posting and collaborating there.

As for me, I am definitely taking it easy this year. I feel like after seven years of increasingly over-the-top amounts of output I deserve a bit of a break. I don’t want to burn out on this.

House/roof

Today the solar panels came down. The roofers still haven’t figured out where I fit in the schedule. Unfortunately the rainy season has started so that makes for some difficulty on that end.

It’s a little annoying to not have my solar operational right now but this time of year it only generates a dollar or two worth of power each day anyway, so I’m not missing out on that much. The more annoying thing is that the panels are being stored in my carport, so my car is sitting out on my driveway for the time being. Not a huge deal of course, and honestly with the rain it’ll probably get cleaner this way.

Choir

Really stoked about our upcoming shows. There’s a couple of pieces I need to work on more but I’m finally feeling confident that I’m not gonna screw up too badly. Who knows how I’ll feel when it’s time for me to sing my solo, though!

I’ve also volunteered to write and deliver a recitation. I have a vague idea of what it’ll be about but I haven’t actually started writing it. I’m sure it’ll be fine though.

Bandcrash

I keep saying I’m going to take a break from it but there was a crash bug which was bothering me (which only reared its head when bulk-encoding several albums, so it probably only affected me while I worked on bringing my back catalog over to itch) and I finally figured out what was causing it. PySide6 (the Qt Python bindings) has an odd interaction with how they opted to reconcile Python’s garbage collector with Qt’s, and it turns out it really hates the idea of multiple ownership between QObjects. Fortunately I was able to break out the shared chunk of data into a pure-Python delegate that I can pass around instead, and that fixed the problem entirely.

While I was at it I also improved the encoding progress indicator so now it shows exactly which build/encode phases are being processed. It’s a thing I’d originally planned to do but I didn’t quite grok Qt’s threading/event model when I first wrote it so I put it off, but I ended up finishing it because I thought my slapdash hack might have been to blame for the crash bug. It wasn’t, but everything’s a lot cleaner and more responsive now anyway.

It did expose another fun annoyance with how Qt handles dialog boxes, though; turns out there’s no clean way to have a background process signal a dialog box that it’s completed before the dialog box has been presented, and I couldn’t figure out the right way to only initiate the threadpool at processing time. As a hack I have a timer fire off 250ms after dialog presentation to retroactively signal completion, which seemed to be the only way I could figure out how to do it. It works well enough, but could be better, of course.

Bandcamp

I’m a little irritated at some musicians who seem to think that because Epic never did anything bad to Bandcamp that Songtradr will be the same, even though Songtradr have already made extremely aggressive moves in laying off half the staff and failing to honor their union in any way. My take on it is that Bandcamp is still the best platform for selling and buying music for now, and I hope that remains the case, but it’s still good to have other options, because Bandcamp’s new owners have proven in multiple ways that they do not have artists' best interests at heart (nor those of their own employees).

Having an alternative to Bandcamp is fucking important, y'all. And I hope others will start using Bandcrash as their own parachute, but even if they don’t, that they use something.

(But that said I feel like Camptown, Bandcrash’s player engine, is the most accessibility-friendly of all of them out there, and provides a lot of functionality that none of the others do. It even beats Bandcamp’s own in several key ways!)

Music listening

Some good music from the last few days:

• May McDonough & Company — Bully Boy with a Glass Eye: Apparently this is an album I got from Feedbands back when they were still a thing (before they turned into a crypto scam and imploded, speaking of shitty chapters in the book of independent music distribution). They don’t seem to be anywhere else online. Weird.
• The War On: Song Fight! with some really good entries. Also some really bad ones, but, such is the nature of the beast. I especially liked BGM’s entry.
• Mike Krol — I Hate Jazz: This music was featured on Steven Universe and it is so fucking good and it makes me want to get into writing punk music.

Cats

Lately Tyler wants to play all night, and Fiona thinks it’s appropriate to sit on my face or throat while I sleep. That isn’t helping with my general fatigue or pain levels. But at least I have plenty of time and space to nap during the day.