april 2025 blogpost
15/05/2025
hello :-)
the weather's been getting colder, and my sense of smell is getting worse - partly because of the temperature, partly because the plants arent as fragrant, and partly because of the onset of my annual six-month perma-cold. i blissfully missed a huge chunk of australia's hideous summer this year, but i did get a lot of value out of impromptu late night beach trips and i'll definitely miss them. my partner and i hopped into the ocean on the night of the last 28 degree day of the season, trying to fool ourselves that the now frigid water would be pleasantly cool instead of painfully teeth-chatteringly cold
still! i love the cold. i enjoy layering up my clothes and light rain, and braving full on thunderstorms under a ten dollar ikea umbrella. i'm excited to head out of the city and go on some drizzly hikes over running streams and hopefully not slip on rocks and crack my head open
this month i went to multiple gallery openings, multiple poetry nights, a live irish punk gig at a garage sale, bought a load of cute ceramics and made a linocut bookplate (i really want to share this because i'm super proud of the final result, but it also has my legal name on it). i'm helping to plan a yule / winter solstice party (the scope of which is getting rapidly out of hand) and making a bunch of posters / images for social media posts. despite all this, it's felt like a pretty quiet month
my music exploration has been both really good and pretty hard to document this april. i've found musicbee's autodj feature allows you to queue up whole albums instead of individual songs, so i've been letting it step through my collection and play albums that i sometimes haven't listened to in years. it's been awesome! but it's made picking out individual albums as discoveries of the month somewhat difficult
top 3 albums
two for the road - herb ellis and joe pass
this is a lovely cruisy jazz guitar pairing between two greats. it handily dodges being too "old timey" and feels like the perfect album to bop around while doing some afternoon baking with a friend.
i love my girl she's my boy - between friends
i scanned my site and i've somehow never talked about this album? it was an absolute mainstay of 2024, starting super high with stalker before taking you on a bit of a mood journey. it feels like a bit of a romantic exploration - fear, excitement, comfort or frustration - paired with some super boppy beats. prime late night driving fodder
the power out - electrelane
i grabbed this album ages ago - i'm not sure who told me about it or where i found it. the band themselves british indie rock group who were only really active from 2000 - 2010 (give or take a couple of years) and this album is considered one of their more experimental. there's less of a cohesive energy than a cohesive lack of cohesion - that can annoy me in some genres, but there's enough commonality in the instrumentation to tie the thing together where it counts. my personal favourite track is The Valleys which features an american a capella troupe singing a british war poem
BONUS!! godhead dub - born_blpy
nothing productive to say about this one, it's just a catchy lil dnb track
cooking blog?
i've been cooking some interesting stuff with my partner and it's got me A. experimenting with and developing recipes and B. wanting a good record of all the recipes that i think are good. i've found keeping lists of references on my blog actually super useful - something about having it super easily accessible through any browser i suppose? i'm thinking of putting recipes that i've stolen or ones that i've modified in their own subsection, similar to the misc posts i currently have, and maybe funnel them into a big masterpost somewhere. i think my initial trepidation on doing something like this was being afraid of being a "food blogger" but like, it's my blog. i get to figure out what it looks like. so i just wont make it like the food blogs that i hate?
heres a little teaser: i'd been dutifully destroying herbs in my fridge for years now, letting them go bad and buying a new bunch in shame. i'd heard of people cleaning and drying bunches when they get them from the store and then storing them in a jar of water and a bag, but i'd never actually given it a go. turns out it totally works! i've had a bunch of dill in there for like three weeks now and it still looks incredible
self hosting updates
ive gone and stressed myself out by deciding to self-host my podcasts, books and comics on top of the other crap that i already have running on my home servers. i've expanded my system to podcasts because theyre easy to acquire and not that large (when your device is a computer instead of a phone), and to comics because i use mihon as a reader and the sites that i download from are starting to get more secure and hard to scrape. i also added books for completeness - i have copies of books on my phone and ipad, might as well have a more permanent library.
audiobookshelf has been good for podcasts, which is to say that it's just about the only self-hosted program that doesnt absolutely stink. it still doesnt really serve podcasts quite how i would like - it was originally designed for audiobooks and it treats episodes as chapters, which is annoying, but it lets you slam content hosts for a show's entire backlog all at once. maybe i'll find a better player some time in the future.
comics / manga are a bit more of a fiddle. i tried suwayomi for a while - it's basically a home server version of the previously mentioned mihon app, which is cool because that app has a lot of good support for downloaders, and bad because those downloaders keep getting broken by new anti-scraping changes to sites. i eventually gave up and just jumped to bulk downloading from
the two heavy hitters in this sphere are komita and komga, and while i think komita is a little prettier and is slightly more user friendly and has better documentation, they charge a premium membership to connect to mihon on my phone while komga is free so, y'know. i went with the free one. the komga discord was super quick to respond to questions i had and made the setup process pretty straightforward. keep an eye out for the upcoming uuupah nerdfest where i explain it to everyone who cares and provide a nice skippable post for the people who dont