Current goings-on
Do people ever read these things? Or do people just like knowing that I’m still alive? Either way here’s a “I’m still alive” post.
Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
Do people ever read these things? Or do people just like knowing that I’m still alive? Either way here’s a “I’m still alive” post.
As mentioned earlier today, the pyBlamscamp name was incredibly confusing and needed to be changed. Thankfully, blackle mori (who made blamscamp in the first place) came up with a much better name suggestion, “Bandcrash.” I have now renamed pyBlamscamp
and its associated Python package appropriately. The blamscamp pypi project now just exists as a thin wrapper around bandcrash and its usage should be discontinued.
Existing installations should continue to work (and might even pull in future updates!) but it’s highly recommended that any scripts, venvs, etc. that rely on it be updated with the new package.
And of course this gives me even more of an impetus to finally write that damn GUI.
Caught up on my collections of:
Added the discographies of:
Because of the recent shenanigans I’ve been working on pyBlamscamp again.
For now I’ve just been working on refactoring it to make a GUI possible, and improving performance by actually parallelizing execution wherever possible. And it’s a lot faster now! On my Mac studio (with the files hosted on my NAS), it now takes only 13 seconds to do the full encode of Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To, down from the previous 105. That’s 8 times as fast! (Presumably it’s mostly I/O bound, what with retrieving the .wav files over gigabit Ethernet, and it would be much faster if the source files were on my local volume.)
So, anyway. My next step will, of course, be to make an actual GUI. Because it’s pretty clear that such a thing would be useful.
Also I should probably rename it. It’s caused quite a lot of confusion, and people don’t seem to understand that pyBlamscamp does way more than the original Blamscamp, but isn’t (yet) as user-friendly. It’s also very much diverged at this point.
So, hey, Bandcamp is a great service that a lot of musicians and fans rely upon for fair distribution and sales of music. It is a really great thing.
Unfortunately, Bandcamp’s owners decided that having a sustainably profitable business wasn’t Enough for them and sold it to Epic Games a year ago, with the idea that it’d become a money-printing factory that does All The Licensing.
And that didn’t pan out, so a week ago Epic re-sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, which is basically an A&R pay-for-play scam with the trappings of respectability. Here’s a video Benn Jordan did on the topic (focusing on a site called Taxi but Songtradr is the same basic thing):
Now Songtradr is blocking the Bandcamp union from actually being, y'know, a union. They aren’t honoring the union terms, have locked workers out of critical systems, are completely ignoring the collective bargaining power of Bandcamp as a company and are doing all sorts of heinous shit.
However! This is not a time to boycott Bandcamp! All that does is make Bandcamp less valuable and gives Songtradr more sway over them, while disproportionately impacting the musicians who rely on it. Please look to see what the union is requesting in terms of support and solidarity. There’s a lot you can do to show your support.
Independent musicians thank you.
Here are the upcoming shows for the choir I participate in:
I hope to see some of you some of there!
I have two major comic series that I’d like to get back to:
So, these two series are very dear to my heart and both of them have been on hiatus for a while. I would like them to not be on hiatus.
Today I went to Bartell’s to pick up a prescription there for the last time. Because Rite-Aid bought them out a while ago, and after making things there worse and worse, they’ve decided to just shut down all the Bartell’s locations that are near Rite-Aids, which is most of them, and I suspect their next plan is to convert whichever ones remain into Rite-Aids as well.
Whenever I walk to a store here I just see all the boarded-up storefronts, half of them from places going out of business, half of them shut down because of crime. Lots of shops have been hit by repeat burglaries, or arson, or who knows what else.
As usual, Bandcamp is waiving their cut of the purchase price on the first Friday of the month. So this is the best time to consider buying my music. Update: Today only, use discount code plaidfriday
to get up to 80% off on everything, including my full discography. Because why not.
As a voracious consumer of music, I maintain a running list of things to buy on the next Bandcamp Friday so that I can make the biggest impact on a monthly cadence (and also keep better track of my music spending habits). Here’s what I bought this month:
For more recommendations, check out my Bandcamp profile, or look at my past Bandcamp Friday posts.
Got some things done today, figured I’d talk about them.