busybee

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.

Caught up on my collections of:

• Posy
• Nicky Flowers

Added the discographies of:

• James Hastings
• our dear friend, the medic

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.

I have two major comic series that I’d like to get back to:

• Unity (no relation to the game engine): a long-form science fiction thing about an interstellar colony ship that’s lost its history, with the initial story being that of one of its scientists who has lost their history
• Lewi: a young dragon is finding herself caught between the worlds of science and spirituality (and there’s also something much bigger going on in the background)

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.

A question keeps on coming up on Mastodon (and the Fediverse in general), namely trying to figure out what the overall age distribution of the userbase is.

However, every single poll that comes about ends up becoming quite contentious in ways that lead to a lot of conflict and drama, primarily due to the nature of how Mastodon polls work. The most common problem is that due to the limited number of options in polls, it is very difficult to make a poll that gives both range and precision. Commonly, the person attempting to run the poll will end up being attacked by people in an age bracket that feel disenfranchised by the specific poll splits, and there’s this… tunnel-vision hyperfocus that a lot of people get into where if they see an “other” or “X or [older|younger]” category, even if there’s a whole thread of polls that dig into splitting up those larger buckets, you get deluged with responses from those who are very angry about the lack of representation.

Attempting to run the poll on a more suitable polling platform (Surveymonkey, Google Forms, Straw Poll, etc.) always ends up with similar concerns, such as worries about privacy or an unwillingness to use the survey platform of choice for whatever technological hill people want to die on. And, again, users who feel put off by this make it their mission to let the perceived offender (and everyone around them) know.

I started out riffing on this with a couple of threads that were not meant to be taken seriously, and which I thought were obvious jokes, but, you know how the Internet can be. Anyway, my third poll (doing it as a median-seeking binary search) was also meant as a joke (which I intended to just be a one-off), but people actually responded to it fairly well. When I posted a followup in which I explained that it was a joke but asked if people wanted me to follow through with it, the overwhelming response was a resounding “yes.”

Clearly there is enough interest in trying to figure out some sort of statistical distribution for the age of Mastodon users (otherwise this wouldn’t keep on happening!), so, #MastoAge was born, for better or worse.