rowecommaadam

[rowecommaadam]

One of the machines broke down at the hyperbole factory. The situation is frustrating, but ultimately manageable.

[rowecommaadam]

single artwork for the track Byōgaku by Galen Tipton/Shmu featuring Hakushi Hasegawa

digital illustration

(2025)

[rowecommaadam]

here's a list of programs/sites/whatever that were helpful to me when i was moving away from using spotify & back to downloading music:

soulseek - peer to peer downloading program, has most music you'd want. there's "rules" to it though and the UI is a little confusing, but you can figure it out. there's tutorials. i believe in you

cobalt.tools, ytiz.xyz, yt-dlp - mp3 downloaders, for the songs that you can't find on soulseek

musicbee - music player, extremely customiseable. reminds me of when i used itunes back in the day. has a lot of good features, including syncing music over to your phone

lastfm & listenbrainz - sites that keep track of your listening stats. i'd recommend this even if you still choose to use a music streaming service

syncedlyrics - cmd thing that gets you timed song lyrics, like the ones spotify has. there's no UI but it's easy enough to use. just grab the lyrics and timestamps it spits out and paste it into musicbee

music presence - program that shows what song you're listening to in your discord status, in case you use discord and enjoy the thought of other people seeing what you're listening to, which i do for some reason

i'm not going to lie to you and say that switching away from spotify/streaming services is an effortless task, it took me half a whole day of nonstop Work to get all my music downloaded and sorted out, but i will say that it was worth it!! and you should do it 👍 if you want to

[rowecommaadam]

Ominous collection for your viewing pleasure.

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Interesting trend in acronyms I've noticed: Niche groups love taking ordinary words that sum up a concept just fine and turning them into more complex acronyms that are incredibly similar to the original word.

Examples: The crypto acronym HODL (Hold On for Dear Life) has all the same letters as "hold" and occupies the same semantic space in popular terms like Keep Calm and HODL. The prepper acronym SHTF (Shit Hits the Fan) throws in an additional letter but still scans as "shit." Kinda interesting. Or as me and my acronym buddies say, kinda INTERESTIGN.

[rowecommaadam]

The name "Jane" is a female version of "John", and if Wikipedia is to be believed it developed not out of "John" directly but as a more novel and upper-class version of the then-commonplace "Joan", also a female version of "John", in the manner of the Kayleighs of today.

But "Joan" is still weird, because it's like that for no clear reason -- the original masculine/feminine pair here is like Johannes/Johanna, which explains nothing! It ends up in German as Johann and Johanna, and stress changes can induce vowel changes, but you'd expect that to work the other way round, with the unstressed O becoming shorter, so it seems to just be that "John" and "Joan" appeared at different times and the need to distinguish them kept the latter from drifting as far as the former. You can see the same general thing happening with "Steve" and "Steph", with the opposite gender/vowel length relationship.

So this isn't very systematic, obviously, and it hardly ever happens. But isn't it tempting to imagine us adopting a convention of gendering names by ablaut?

Bill (m.) -> Beele (f.)

Jeff (m.) -> Jafe (f.)

Bob (m.) -> Bobe (f.)

Dan (m.) -> Dane (f.)

Mike (m.) -> Make (f.)

Greg (m.) -> Graygue (f.)

Keith (m.) -> Kayth (f.)

Scott (m.) -> Scote (f.)

James (m.) -> Jymes (f.)

and so forth

[rowecommaadam]

You have to yell a swear from the swear jar every time you give someone a quarter

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[rowecommaadam]

what will it be, boss? the comfort of misery or the pain of change?

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[rowecommaadam]

Honey they’re inventing unions at DoorDash

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Circle avatars were a mistake

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~ Popular Amusements, Rev. J. T. Crane, D.D, 1870

The Rev. J.T. Crane, who previously disapproved of reading novels, turns his attention to another frivolous time-waster: the game of chess.

[rowecommaadam]