three albums

ii by ben von wildenhaus

it's a little hard to put a nice neat description on this album. the picture of ben on the cover definitely gets you in the right headspace - it's a very guitar-forward experience with these slow melodies, sometimes haunting, sometimes somber, sometimes with a bit of a strange western-style drive. the album also has this weird mirror effect in its setlist, two songs are presented as sequels of their namesakes and the songs tu and two are obviously linked. in general i think the tone means i might not listen to this song much more under my own steam, but i really enjoyed the experience

stone crazy by buddy guy

[click here to load the youtube video]

i don't have a huge frame of reference for blues music, but this one is big out of the gate and keeps on trucking for the full forty minutes. buddy guy is clearly an incredible guitarist - he absolutely thrashes out in each solo throughout the album. i'm keen to check more blues out next month!

flourishing views by martin gauffin

i've actually listened this album loads in the past, but it's been given a new lease on life this month. this album has this kind of simmering positivity that creeps up on you, until you're awash in an almost overwhelming feeling of calm and warmth. each track is built up from layers of plucky strings and backed by keys and a bowed instrument (i assume a double bass? a viola?). it's absolutely delightful

agony26

i got an entirely unprompted email from clover about its spin on my already very stupid keyboard. the pure unadulterated joy i received from this moment is pretty hard to top honestly. a lot of people who have remixed the board have gone and "fixed" it, which is diametrically opposed to the point, but clover has the joke on lock. clover is no doubt reading this, so thank you again for this incredible project, you made my entire week!

hyprland

i've also been dumping a frankly embarassing amount of time into setting up a new linux environment. i've started with fedora, the distribution i'm most familiar with, taken the sway spin and installed hpyrland over the top of it

the upside to this kind of installation is an immense level of control and efficiency, but that's also kind of the downside. there's been a recent swing in some online spaces (partly driven by pewdiepie, of all people) to use this kind of system and i personally don't think that it's a good move for a linux newbie, but if you've been messing around with it for five or so years you probably know enough to get yourself out of the problems you will inevitably get yourself in.

if you are a linux dork though, this is a huge opportunity to set up a system where every piece of software and almost every piece of general computer functionality is something that you've configured for yourself. this makes the whole thing an immense time waster as you sift through five alternate options for any little menu or popup or other on-screen doodad (i spent five hours the other day configuring and styling the notifications that pop up in the corner of the screen), but when it all works properly the effect is extremely satisfying

i've fallen in love with the everforest theme, although picking a wallpaper that i felt fit it took a little while (i went for this one by simon stalenhag). most big apps have premade themes, although ive found the matches haven't been amazing straight out of the box and have needed tweaking. i've also done away with all of hyprlands flashy effects - i find them to be a bit tacky and a waste of screen real estate. i've instead gone for something more flat and square and aliased, which plays nicely with my beloved unifont and proggy fonts, and saves a bit of battery power to boot.

for those interested, my dotfiles are on my github. i also thought i'd shout out a couple of discoveries that have really impressed me:

micro text editor

link

i refuse to learn vim, but nano is a bit too limited, and has a lot of annoying quirks. micro has everything i've wanted from a text editor so far, and its quite mature to boot. it hasn't been quite enough to boot me off of zed yet, but they keep spruiking ai features and i wouldnt mind to give them the flick eventually

dunst media control

link

this is a little script that lets you use the dunst notification manager as your on-screen-display for brightness and volume. it's really snappy, and most importantly just works. i struggled with so many osd options before this one and none of them behaved for me, but this was a single file i just dumped in my binary directory

bemoji

link

in a similar way to dunst media control, i'd fiddled with so many different emoji picker options and none of them had really behaved. bemoji did require a tiny bit of tweaking to support tofi, my picker of choice, but once i had it set up it worked a charm

also, i know i made a big deal of nobara couple of weeks ago but i've recently just been plugging my laptop in to a usb c dock attached to my tv and running off of that directly and its honestly perfectly fine. the problem with those little micro pcs is the wireless cards in them tend to be kind of crap and laptops tend to have much better ones. if i move somewhere with ethernet in the walls i'll probably change back, but this works for now

video games!

loco motive

i mentioned this one in last month's post but didn't really extrapolate. loco motive is a point and click mystery adventure heavily inspired by the classic sierra and lucas arts point and clicks of the 90s and 00s, and it nails the whole experience as far as i'm concerned. the pixel art is extremely expressive, the foley and music sell the atmosphere, and the writing is extremely funny. it suffers from weird pacing and a little bit of bizarre puzzle logic, but i did say it nailed the experience. the game does have a hint system built in with a pretty nice in-game explanation for its existence, and i didn't feel too much guilt using it. i wrestled through the thing in an afternoon and an evening and felt very satisfied by the whole deal

animal well

i very clearly remember dunkey spruiking this game a year or so back and being desperately unconvinced by the trailers and the aesthetic. i almost think that aesthetic is an overall detriment to the game, because, while i have actually come around to it and think it's pretty nice now, i feel it distracts in a way from the depth of gameplay hidden within. animal well is fucking great. it's pretty comfortably in my top three metroidvanias of all time, and probably my favourite puzzle metroidvania (although not many others come to mind).

whisper in the wind book

i've been reading this luke arnold series since the beginning and i swear, they just keep getting better. the conceit of a noir mystery set in a post-magic fantasy world, depicting the effects of a decaying population of elves, dwarves, wizards and the like and integrating it deeply with the aforementioned mysteries is great. the episodic nature of the books make them great to pick up and put down, but the overarching story and development / redemption of the main character is really rewarding of long term readers (like myself). plus it's written by an australian! bonus!

sgtcharlynne

link
this website's style is fucking awesome! the blogpost about how you can shift from youtube to your own personal video hosting site is alse really good! if i could critique it a little, i don't think it thinks about how people would discover new video creators in a post-youtube world, but we did do it before, and we could probably do it again. maybe someone could start some kind of neocities-style website that sort of pseudo-centralises an otherwise pretty decentralised (at least structure-wise) website system?

me

for a nice change of pace, i've been feeling slightly mentally out of sorts the last couple of weeks. i've identified it as a feeling of my world shrinking and expanding simultaneously.

shrinking

i touched on some weirdness with a friend that happened at the start of the year, and the results have continued to propogate this year. said friend has two bands and many of the band members are good friends of mine, but he has asked me to not come to their shows. this fuels a fair bit of fomo when seeing clips from their shows online

i spent a lot of time over the last couple of years with the local queer climbing group, but two key members were dating and have had a bit of a nasty break up, meaning neither of them attend anymore. this hasn't really splintered the group, but it feels like the cool group of friends has been a bit impacted by the whole experience, and we don't have the same level of contact anymore

i've also definitely become somewhat less driven to meet people and go to gigs now that i'm no longer single. it's definitely nowhere near as dramatic a change as the one previously mentioned, but i feel like my outgoing-ness and willingness to take conversation risks has shrunk slightly and i kind of don't like it

expanding

i've met a bunch of awesome people through dating my partner! their housemate is extremely funny and fun to be around, and i've had more exposure to some of their really cool friends and the artists they work with through going to their events

i've also sort of just stumbled into some closer friendships than i expected. i know a lot of people who i thought were a bit too cool for me, but they actually went out of their way to talk to me directly and invite me to things? huhh?? a morale booster to be sure

and of course my partner is fucking awesome. it's been really fun to get to know them better and discover more cool things that i like about them, as well as offering my support in their life

i'm still frazzled! i'm kind of always frazzled and honstly probably need therapy, but things could be a whole lot worse