đź”— a linked post to
newcommute.net »
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originally shared here on
I remember finding a ton of inspiration (and incredible music, of course) from this collection last year. The artistry on display is exquisite.
đź”— a linked post to
youtube.com »
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originally shared here on
I’ve been listening to a lot of Donald Lawrence and the Tri-City Singers lately. Big, powerful gospel choir music feels pretty dang good right now.1
This gospel choir-fueled version of the U2 hit is something else.
I actually got to be part of a gospel choir in college, and it was one of the best experiences I had at the U. ↩
đź”— a linked post to
seanvoisen.com »
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originally shared here on
By many peoples’ standards, I don’t actually actually own a lot of books. But, of the books I do own, I’ve probably read only about 70% of them. And of that 70%, I can’t even admit to reading each book in its entirety. This is intentional. I like cultivating a “home library,” which I believe must include an inventory of unread books awaiting future serendipitous re-discovery. I’m not alone in this. In Reading Well, Simon Sarris describes a similar personal philosophy:
You should buy books on a whim, whenever possible, enough that you start to forget about them. You shouldn’t know the whole contents of your own shelves. If you create a home library it should act as one: It is there for you to discover and rediscover, to get lost in.
For me, it’s a library, but for music.
I was thinking today about how I feel like I’m in a rut with my music library. I’ve spent an hour or two every day for weeks now cultivating my collection of music that has followed me for decades.
And I’m tired. All that weeding is hard work, even if it’s “just” carefully adding ID3 tags and the highest album art you can possibly find for each piece of music you have.
But the payoff is that I have an amazing garden, a well curated selection of tunes that provide answers to many of the questions I ask that can’t be specifically answered by books.
I also enjoy the Whim concept that Sean describes here. As I’m finding my attention being drawn away from the music (or, if I find my attention is drawn back into the music in a non-harmonious way), I pull it from the garden.
After all: if an album was meant to fit into my life somehow, it’ll find its way back in there.
đź”— a linked post to
staticmade.com »
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originally shared here on
When I returned home from this morning’s run, Jilly asked how far I ran.
“I’m not quite sure,” I told her. “I ran through the woods for about an hour and fifteen minutes, so that’s maybe six or seven miles, but I don’t know for sure.”
She didn’t quite understand why I would run if I wasn’t paying attention to how far I ran.
I think all of this boils down to the phase of life I’m currently in. I’m getting older and I’m okay with that. I’m not chasing paces anymore. I’m not chasing mileage volume. I’m not putting pressure on myself to progress at all costs. I don’t get upset if life gets busy and I don’t have time for my daily run. There are no ultramarathons on my docket.
Things are different now.
These days I’m chasing experiences – I want a unique one with each outing, and that’s only possible if I am fully present during each outing. These days I’m chasing future experiences and a level of fitness that will keep me on this planet for a bit longer so someday in the not-too-distant future I can be active with my grandkids.
That’s a different kind of ultra, but it’s the one I’m training for these days.
Bingo. This is me, in every area of my life lately.
This morning, I went for a walk immediately after finishing my burpees. I had my Apple Watch on, and it buzzed, letting me know that there’s been a change in my health activity.
I honest-to-god snort laughed, then immediately took my watch off and moved on with my walk.1 Of course there’s been a change, I didn’t need my watch to tell me that.
Being present is super hard, especially with the internet doing everything it can to draw me towards it. But thanks to myself skipping the internet today, I got the third corner of my garage cleaned! Only one more to go before I can really start making this area dope as hell.2
Another related observation: an interesting side effect of my desire to collect new music means that each new album has the potential to serve as the background track to this current moment in life.
There are many albums which point me to general moments in my life, not so much specific memories.
If I want to remember what it felt like to drive home from a midnight truck at Best Buy, I pop on The Presets’ Apocalypto.
If I want to remember what it felt like in the early days of dating Shanny, I’ll listen to Ombarrops by The Car is On Fire.
It’s kind of cool to see the intersection and synergy of my two collections.
It was a good walk today! The boys were out laying fiber in my neighborhood and the weather was absolutely flawless. ↩
Admittedly, more of the credit for this goes to the weather for causing Charlee’s softball tournament to be postponed, but while the rest of my family sat on screens for several hours, I got to work. ↩
đź”— a linked post to
theonion.com »
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originally shared here on
Local man Paul Campbell confirmed Saturday he was raising his daughter Emma on a variety of media carefully selected to help her cultivate an appreciation for artistic quality, a move that will reportedly put the 12-year-old girl hopelessly out of touch with her generation.
Ouch. An on-point Onion article.
Of course, I do not hesistate to bump the music I want to listen to around the house, which will certainly imprint that music into my kids’ brains, but I also am trying to immerse myself in the media that they enjoy.
Recent examples include Minecraft, the TV show Jessie, YouTubers Mikey & JJ, Chappell Roan, and that “Apt” song.
đź”— a linked post to
youtu.be »
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originally shared here on
Pretty sure I’ve shared my love for Tony Hawk on this blog before, but it doesn’t hurt to remind myself every once in a while what a stand up human this guy is.
He surfaced today in the form of a YouTube video as part of Amoeba Record’s “What’s In My Bag?” series, where famous people gather their favorite forms of media from around the store and then talk about why it’s meaningful to them.
From this video alone, I wrote down a bunch of albums that I’m gonna try bumping while on vacation next week, including:
Scunthorpe Problem nods excitedly ↩
đź”— a linked post to
satisfyrunning.com »
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originally shared here on
After asking Henry Rollins if he is still punk at age 64:
I would have to say yes because it’s the ideology that has stayed with me: anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-homophobia, anti-discrimination, and you know, equality, fairness, decency, all of that. To me, that’s punk rock. And I don’t think that’s bad. If I had a kid, I'd say be honest, you know? Find a slow kid in school and become friends with them because people make fun of them. And when people start making fun of him, you know, stick up for him, man, you’ll be a hero, you’ll lead.
(via Naz)
đź”— a linked post to
maya.land »
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originally shared here on
One thing you’re not supposed to admit to: not enjoying basic activities of hygiene maintenance. I get that it’s suspect. I swear to you I do shower enough, but the whole process (the hair removal! the exfoliation, body and facial! the shampoo-rinse-shampoo-rinse-conditioner-rinsing!) is to me tedious at its core, and I know few enough of you all in real life to be able to admit it here.
So: I bought a Bluetooth speaker that claims enough waterproofness for my own plausible deniability to use it in the shower.
This then opens up an important soundtracking opportunity. What is the right music to propel one through the emotional deadness of a shower1?
Maya goes on to recommend froge.mp3 by piri & Tommy Villiers. Listening to it now, I can totally see myself shaving and washing with this album in the background.
It makes me wonder: what albums do y’all recommend for random every day tasks? Like, what are you bumping when you’re folding socks? Or pulling weeds?
I'm beginning the slow process of turning this blog into a digital garden, and on the whole, I'm working on cleaning up the digital messes that have been accumulating for decades.
Over the past year, I spent time almost every day going through my Plex library and my drives which contain nearly every saved file since I've used a computer and deciding what to do with them.
This process has had many fits and starts, which feels correct. In my day job, I don't get many "fits and starts" because I'm being paid to understand a task and deliver it. Pruning a digital garden gives me a chance to be a rookie again, where I can take steps in a direction and learn from my mistakes.
I figured it might be interesting to the IndieWeb to see some ways I'm pruning and using AI to seriously help me.
I have a handful of .wsz files on my drives, and at first glance, I could not remember what a .wsz file even did.
I asked Claude and it helpfully told me that they were Winamp skin files, which were essentially .zip files with a different extension, so I was able to dig around inside to see what they were.
Winamp skins contained a handful of .bmp files that used image spriting, a technique commonly used by devs to optimize memory usage. It's clever, but clever things are often inscrutable twenty years later.
So at first, I went to Claude and asked it to write me an app that took in a .wsz file and showed me what the overall theme looked like. Honestly? Not completely terrible results here for 3 minutes of vibe coding1:
It turned out that the themes I had on my machine were already represented in the Winamp Skin Museum, so thank god "Darth Maul vs. Ash Ketchem" is still being appreciated here in 2025.
I've been working on a way to display my music library on my site, and the basic layout I've been vibe coding for the past few days is here:
You can see the live version of it here. It's kinda neat.
But as you can see on the screenshot, I show a list of an album's genres and styles and moods.
I am not extremely picky about these, but many of them are missing from services like MusicBrainz, so I decided to use Claude and ChatGPT to help me fill in the blanks.
I've got another 30 or so to go, but the page looks a lot better with something in there. I think I'll use this layout to help me consolidate or improve the tags later, which I guess makes it a win for having this layout in the first place.
Another improvement I'd like to make to this is being able to browse by mood. I'd love to have an interface where I am prompted about my general feeling at the moment and have it surface albums to complement that vibe.
I define "vibe coding" as using an LLM to write almost all the code for a project with extremely minimal adjustments on my end. Sometimes, I feel like it's wasteful to vibe code "string change"-sized adjustments, so I will often make those changes in a text editor and, if I need to vibe code something larger, I provide the current file in its entirety and say "here is the most recent version of my code, you can forget anything you've written so far" so it can free up that out-of-date info from its context window. ↩
đź”— a linked post to
youtu.be »
—
originally shared here on
Watching Jon Batiste improvise over a song he’s never heard before is magical. If you need a shot of pure joy in the arm today, give this a watch.