busybee fluffy rambles

Back when Publ was brand-new I was using a fairly common ORM for managing my database. It was okay but I had some issues with how the project was being run, particularly in how the core maintainer treated bug reporters who were reporting things that he didn’t personally agree with.

So I switched to Pony ORM, which has a much nicer, more-Pythonic API, and whose maintainers are friendly and helpful. It’s missing a few important functions such as migrations but for Publ it doesn’t matter so much and they were always claiming that migrations were coming “real soon now” for a while.

Unfortunately, some changes in Python 3.11 broke Pony completely, and progress on getting it working again has been, well, slow.

Back when I switched to Pony I mused about just dropping SQL entirely and moving to a more primitive indexed data store, such as lmdb. But I really do not have it in me to completely redo all that stuff in Publ again, especially with all of the weird regressions that always occur due to subtle differences in locking behavior and so on.

Sometimes I think how now that I actually know how Publ should work I should rewrite it with better testability and a more actively-developed Markdown processor (because misaka has also been abandoned and is in permafreeze status), and if I’m going to do that, maybe I should use it as an excuse to finally learn Rust because honestly the Python ecosystem is kind of a mess right now.

I’ve put so much work into Publ but keeping the project going just feels so… difficult.

Or I mean I could switch to any number of existing site generators out there but then I’d be giving up all of the things that makes Publ unique (friends-only/access-controlled entries, variadic templates, top-notch template-driven image renditions, etc.).

This is one of those things where the decision would be a lot easier to make if people were actually helping to fund Publ development or if it had any actual, y'know, users.

Ah yes, lots of frustrating stuff happening all at once, so much so that I’ve wrapped around to not caring about any of it.

I feel like I’m trapped in a gravity well and am having difficulty motivating myself to do anything at all. I’ve been sleeping way too much, and it isn’t actually helping with anything. I have a severe case of anhedonia when it comes to actually doing things I care about. I’m pretty much just hanging out at home with my cats and occasionally getting on VRChat and plinking away at the same trivial things I usually do, and I’m having trouble keeping up with my chores or my gardening. I’m barely getting out of the house except to go grocery shopping.

It sucks and I hate it.

I didn’t listen to much music over the last few days for a variety of reasons (and didn’t accumulate enough notes that felt worth posting) but today I am happy to report that I’m back on my shit. Not that the actual date/order of listening matters but as always you can corroborate the times on my last.fm profile if you really want.

Notables:

• “General Ed’s Naked Circus” by Helter Skipper and the Gilligan Mansons. It isn’t a particularly great album but it’s fun and I have it because I used to be friends with one of the members of the band, who I vibed with pretty well. Hearing the album again made me realize I hadn’t talked with him in ages, and I decided to track him down. I just hit a bunch of dead ends. If anyone happens to know what happened to a squirrel named “Fractal” from FurryMUCK, please let me know. I remember us sharing regrets that we never got together the first time that I lived in Seattle, and since then I’ve moved back to Seattle and I’ve been here for over a decade this time around and, oops, I really should have reconnected at some point.

  I did find a SoundCloud playlist from one of the members which lists the other members. I’m not sure which one is the real-life name of my online friend, although there’s two likely candidates. Unfortunately I can’t find current contact information for either of them (just a bunch of dead Facebook pages). Although the more likely of the two seems to still be active there. I should reach out.

• I don’t listen to Song Fight! as much as I should but this fight came up in my playlist and while most of the entries were pretty darn good, these entries stood out in particular:

  • Lily Plus Martin
  • Slither

  I mean there’s a bunch of consistently-great musicians who submitted for that one and the fight as a whole was pretty great! I’d have had a hard time narrowing down my votes on it if I’d actually listened at the time. But these entries were from folks I’m not so familiar with and they surprised me for various reasons.

• The album Here Be Dragons by Blue Nagoon wasn’t in my playlist but it was in a long-open browser tab (based on a recommendation from the person who runs Radio Free Fedi). I finally decided to consume it and, yeah, it’s pretty great! I’ve added the album to my Bandcamp Friday purchase queue.

• One of the first punk bands I got really into was Arrogant Sons of Bitches, when they were touring and happened to play a show in my town the same night a friend decided she needed to get me out of the house. Years later, the core members founded a new band, Bomb the Music Industry!, and when I learned about this I got all of their albums.

  Anyway, one of them finally came up in the playlist, and it was well worth the wait (and the download). It has all the same old ASOB energy while also being a nice scathing criticism of the modern music industry (especially performative counterculture) and also bringing in a variety of acoustic elements like synths that I don’t recall ASOB ever using.

  There’s also a great self-aware line in the second track, “I’ve been writing the same song […] over and over and over again,” in a song which sounds… pretty much exactly like half of the ASOB songs, frankly. It works.

• Alternative Facts by KXNG Crooked is a great missive on the political landscape of 2017, which still applies today. Somehow this track doesn’t seem to be on their Bandcamp as far as I can tell. Looks like it was actually released by a major label? Good for them.

• Tes Lacets sont des Fees by Dionysos is a fun little ditty. I don’t understand a word of it.

• “The Legend” by 5-3 Federation is a classic that is kinda uh. Maybe problematic? Also I think this was one of Lowtax’s musical projects? I’m finding no information about it. I am pretty sure I got it from Something Awful’s front page back in the day, but if there is a link between Lowtax and this track, literally nobody on the Internet has made that connection so it probably isn’t him.

• Vektroid is always great. I think this is the first time I heard Telnet Erotika, which apparently has been expanded and rereleased as Telnet Complete. Do I need to update my collection? Looks like yes. Another (potentially expensive) addition to the Bandcamp Friday queue. Man, I’m starting to see why people just subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music these days.

• Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds has a track called “The History of French Cuisine” which also doesn’t seem to be on bandcamp but it’s a great Frank Zappa-esque jammy thing.

• Whale Legs by Guts Club, from the Moderate Fildelity microlabel

Okay I think that’s enough for right now. Having a mental health shit at the moment

I got a late start on listening to music today since this morning I was having some stomach issues and didn’t want the extra sensory input, and then I had to take Tyler to the vet for his annual wellness exam and butthole grooming.

But after I got home from that I started listening to music again. Here’s things that are tickled my ears today:

• Ouch Those Monkeys was a really weird musician who posted a lot of music to somesongs back in the day, and then disappeared just as suddenly. I collected most of his(?) music at the time. I wish there were more information about him. As far as I can tell it’s completely disappeared from the Internet.
• Magic Arm - Move Out is great. No idea how I ended up with it. Anyway I bought way too much music yesterday so this band is going into my Bandcamp Friday queue.
• Wow I have a lot of crap in my library. The downside to being a packrat.
• Also I’m not sure how to feel about songs that make use of the N-word (as a reclaimed thing, sung/spoken by Black artists). Part of me is like “this music isn’t for me and I shouldn’t listen to it” but another part of me is like “why is this particular racial barrier a line I draw and not others?” I of course would never sing along to it, but I also don’t generally sing along to music in the first place. I’m definitely a lot quicker to skip songs based on the use of that word and I think that deserves some introspection.
• So that said, Die Later is a pretty good jam.
• Okay I probably should draw the line at white rappers using the N-word though.
• The only Gorillaz albums I have are “Gorillaz” and “Plastic Beach.” I should complete my collection. I definitely don’t want to fall down the Deep Lore rabbit hole though.
• Jeremy Blake’s Heartsing is pretty great and it’s also surprising that my deep-dive listening pulled up something so recently-released. I guess that’s just how probability works.
• Artemis' Gravity is just plain amazing. It gives me pretty strong Portishead mixed with Imogen Heap vibes.
• A couple of good Remixfight songs came up. I miss Remixfight. It was a short-lived spinoff of Song Fight!, where folks would all do a different remix of the same song that week. Most of the folks who were active there eventually moved over to ccMixter but I never really found that the ccMixter remix output was even remotely as high-quality, for a number of reasons. Unfortunately I can’t figure out the actual artist behind this song, or the original song, and neither thing is findable online, and remixfight is long gone, and the archive.org archive of it is weirdly broken in ways I’ve never seen happen on archive.org, but it seems to be entitled “Blue Ocean” originally by Colin Mutchler. The specific remix I liked was by Milo; for some reason the tags on the fight were also messed up so I only heard that one in isolation, whee. But anyway uh. Remixfight was great.
• Brain Fog by Nicky Flowers is also pretty great. It also has a video as it turns out.

I used to be a voracious consumer of music. I would listen to as much music as I could, in as many different genres, from as many different bands, as I could handle, for nearly every waking moment of every day. My music collection has over 53,000 songs with a total duration of over 130 days. My choices in listening devices and methodologies have always been informed by how I can enable myself to listen to as much variety as I could, without needing to actually choose what to listen to at any given time.

Music also helped me to focus what I was working on, and was possibly a big part of my self-medication regime for my ADHD and executive dysfunction. Having music playing made it so much easier for me to focus on what I was doing.

I also developed a peculiar habit: every time I came across a song I really liked, I’d buy the entire discography of the artist as a “surprise gift for my future self.” It’s a big part of why my music library is so big, and it’s given me a lot of delight from always having something new to listen to.

But yet, over the last few years I have barely listened to any music at all, aside from the stuff I’ve been working on myself. Most of my day has been full of silence, pretty much only listening to music when I drive — and I hardly ever drive. And the silence has been overwhelming, maddening, and is possibly a big part of why my brain’s been in vice grips as of late.

How did this happen?

One of the reasons that people buy an electric vehicle is to reduce their carbon footprint. Even if you live in an area where electricity is primarily generated by fossil fuel, the amount of emissions that come from generating electricity to power a vehicle is much lower than the equivalent emissions than you get from an internal combustion engine, due to things like carbon capture and the overall economy of scale that comes with power generation. And, of course, many areas are moving away from fossil fuels for power generation to begin with; electricity is fungible and with the increase in renewable sources such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric, electric vehicles' overall environmental footprint will improve along with the electrical grid.

So, of course, one of the more maddening trends in environmental policy of late is the purchasing of “carbon offsets” or “carbon credits,” where polluters spend money on things that will supposedly make up for their pollution. Many of these offsets are a total scam, where the offset is just buying into not making the environment worse (for example, by not bulldozing a forest that was already protected to begin with).

The intersection of these two things is that many of the electric vehicle companies (both manufacturers and charging networks) are selling carbon offsets — against the very same customers who are paying good money to do their part to reduce emissions in the first place. This negates the environmental benefit of electric vehicles, and most EV owners would probably like to know which companies are double-dipping in this way.