#i just wanted to get rid of some close to expired stuff while also clearing space for future holiday leftovers | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

narcissasdaffodil · 3 years

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WIP Wednesday

Thanks for the tag @daisybarks

I’m tagging @kiki-the-creator @hopeshoodie @juggalohenrik @eskiix and @rennell

This is a little snippet from enough for you, which is my most recent WIP. This is the cheating fic, which I’ve likely referenced. This might not make sense out of context.

The other three piled into the back, Aislinn in the middle and the other two having window seats. Bobby handed the others their food and sat back with his arms folded. “Aw, come on! I wanted shotgun! And why is this car such a mess?” Bobby grumbled, his heart not fully in it.

“It was worse than this. We actually cleared it slightly to make room for everyone. And Marisol did say that one of us could take shotgun, and I let Lucas have it because he’s taller.” Hope pointed out once she chewed her mouthful.

“It smells weird in here too. Is there an air freshener?”

“It’s broken. Olivia forgot to replenish it. I haven’t noticed the smell if I’m honest, I’m used to it.” Marisol finished her breakfast, grabbing the empty bags and got out of the car, binning them and made her way back to the car, putting on her seatbelt. As she started the car, the sat nav came on and she left it there. She was going to try and rely on her memory, which might not be the best idea.

Once everyone plugged in their seatbelts, they set off. Marisol followed signs for the motorway until she got stuck in a queue getting onto the M4. It was crawling, and she opened the windows to let some fresh air in. The air conditioning only blew hot air and was next to useless.

As the car stopped, Bobby started rooting around at his feet until he discovered a bag full of ketchup bottles and another bag of chocolate, crisps, nuts and sweets. In addition to the two bags, there was a lot of sweet stuff sitting on the floor.

“Who needs an entire bagful of ketchup bottles? Eight bottles in one bag!” He studied the bag, slightly perplexed.

“Wait, what? So that’s where all the ketchup went! I kept buying bottles, and Olivia clearly kept swiping them. Eight bottles, really?” Marisol’s eyes widened at the mention of the ketchup. Bobby handed Lucas the bagful of ketchup, who studied it himself.

“Most of these are open, and half full. What’s the point of starting a new one when the old one is already half full? I was checking that side of the car as well, how did I miss this?” Lucas checked the bottles in the bag. “Some of these are expired too, quite the stash! One or two years out of date.”

“Eww. See what you can salvage, and we’ll bin the rest when we get to the beach. What a waste of good ketchup, I even bought Heinz! I can’t believe she was stealing it.” Marisol stared at the bag, slightly miffed. “That being said…I did use it for a lot of meals, I did have a little ketchup problem. It would vanish every single time we had an argument. Which means she was taking it then to be petty, likely. It’s a major pet peeve, she sees it as such a waste.”

“More of a waste is definitely her stealing it, as of course you’d buy more! Does the money she’s wasting ever come into it?” Aislinn asked.

“Nope, no way. She’s the type who broke her phone last month and had her parents buy her the newest iPhone in replacement. It wasn’t even cracked or damaged, so she let me have it. I changed everything over, her parents aren’t paying for my phone as well. It was going to go to waste completely otherwise, she would’ve just binned it.” Marisol laughed slightly at the idea of Olivia even thinking about money. The same person who regularly spent £400 on clothes per week and went on regular shopping sprees definitely wasn’t the type to care about the money she’s wasting.

She looked back at the road just as the queue moved and moved forward again. “Found anything else that is edible? There’s bound to be food hanging about.”

“Gummy worms, gummy bears, strawberry laces, Strawbs, this bag is all sweets. There’s a soft container of Pringles too, I wouldn’t touch those. There’s also unopened bags of fruit and nuts so I’ll take those out. Most of the chocolate is fine too, and the unopened crisp bags. This is quite the stash! Half of it is empty packets. Did she just use the car for a dustbin?” Bobby handed Lucas the dodgy snacks, who just bagged them with the dodgy ketchup.

“She pretty much used the car as a bin, yup. And she kept stealing the sweet stuff from the flat, so I had to keep hiding my biscuits and chocolate. Eventually we agreed that she would buy her own sweet stuff and quit taking mine. Guess I didn’t clarify that sweet stuff meant ketchup too, and she couldn’t just steal stuff in petty revenge.” Marisol explained. To her relief, the queue started moving quickly and she took advantage, getting onto the motorway without too much fuss. She wasn’t a fan of driving on motorways.

“The window’s not working again, could you please open it from your side?” Lucas asked.

Marisol opened both windows, the car was starting to get absolutely roasting. The feet smell was starting to get to her slightly.

“The windows in the back don’t work, by the way. Hopefully you guys are fine with just these ones open.” Marisol called in the direction of the back, the others nodded in response.

“Can we get rid of some of the mess at the beach? There’s sandwich containers, coffee cups and something squishy back here.” Bobby prodded the something squishy and took his hand away fast. “That’s definitely gum. Why has she stuck that on the back of the seat?” He pulled it off with a tissue, wiping away the residue.

“We can get rid of the leftovers, coffee cups and sandwich containers at least. Or anything that’s gone off. The rest of it, I don’t know what she wants done with it. She might’ve left, but it’ll seem a bit too final to clear out nearly all of it…” Marisol’s voice faded slightly and she bit her lip. “Look, I’m not overly pleased with the state of it myself. But I’ve got bigger fish to fry currently. I’ve had too many arguments with Olivia over it, and she made it worse to mess with me. I gave up mentioning it eventually. You’ve been complaining so much, it’s getting on my nerves.”

Marisol focused on the road ahead, chewing on her lip.

“Yeah, you’ve made your point. Maybe me and Lucas are just more used to it, but it’s been far worse than this before.” Hope broke in before Bobby decided to reply.

“Why didn’t we just split into two cars anyway? I wouldn’t have minded driving, and it’s a little cramped in the back. Driving’s not ideal, I prefer shotgun, but Lucas nabbed that. We could’ve split into me and Lucas in one car, and you three in this one.” Bobby grumbled.

Lucas stared at Marisol in panic, his eyes widened at Bobby’s statement. “That wouldn’t work. You barely paused for breath when we got lost yesterday, and during the first film of the Harry Potter marathon. I couldn’t handle it then, being trapped in a car with just you wouldn’t work.”

Marisol’s mouth twitched, and she struggled to not burst into laughter, putting on the radio instead. Classical music burst out of the speakers, and she jumped. Aislinn quickly synced up her phone to the radio, attaching it via a charging wire. She instructed Lucas in the front, who followed her instructions and in no time at all, a playlist replaced the classical music.

“Phew. I forgot Olivia always listens to Classic FM, on loud. She’s even had noise complaints, from classical music of all things. And, Bobby, if you want to drive on the way back, be my guest! It made completely no sense to split into two cars just because you couldn’t handle the mess.” The hot car was making Marisol slightly grumpy, and she snapped at him.

The car fell silent as they became absorbed in the music. Marisol and Aislinn had done far too much drunk karaoke, and she recognised the playlist from that. Hold the Line started playing and Marisol started singing along to it, forgetting the others were in the car. The energy carried through the car and lasted until the end of the song. She stopped, slightly breathless and blinked, wide eyed.

“Wow. I forgot how good you were at this. My favourite karaoke partner ever. Maybe we should try it again, but sober?” Aislinn said.

Her words stunned Marisol slightly, and she blushed. “R...Really? You think I’m that good? I doubt that, I freeze up on stage. Drunk karaoke is slightly different.” Yeah, no. That’s not happening. Not after that time in secondary school, when you auditioned for the school talent show and got so nervous that you were sick backstage, and your throat closed up while on stage. You couldn’t sing anything and tripped coming off stage on a loose shoelace and wiped out. To make matters worse, it was recorded and passed around the school until you were known for that. Your sister hated being associated with you as a result and it was so embarrassing.

Marisol fell silent, chewing on her lip and listening to the music. She signalled and moved into the left lane, ready to come off the motorway.

She focused entirely on driving and only relaxed when she got to the car park. She parked and let out a sigh of relief. “No sat nav needed at all, and not a foot wrong. That proves it, I’ve got a better sense of direction than Olivia.”

“I’m pretty sure everyone does.” Bobby pointed out. “Along with being better at being on time. I had to tell her a fake time for my birthday two months ago and she was still late.”

#litg #love island the game #litg marisol #fic snippet #litg bobby #litg hope #litg lucas #enough for you

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thetriggeredhappy · 4 years

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Okay so that last one with scout losing snipes broke my heart into a zillion pieces so... What if sniper never died? Maybe he was badly hurt and is hiding somewhere... -🐑

i really like how you people keep doing this thing where you’re like “hey what if you ripped my whole heart out and stomped on it” then i do because you literally asked and you're all “owie :( ouch owie :( can i have a band-aid now” like it’s funny every time

(warnings for mention of firearms and discussion of severe life-threatening injury)

His contract expired.

Somewhere along the line—wonder when?—apparently his work had gotten ‘sloppy’. He’d gotten ‘erratic’. So six years after what all happened, when his contract was up to be renewed, Miss Pauling gently urged him to let it expire and to just head home.

It wasn’t like he had a good reason not to. He didn’t particularly get along with any of the team (anymore). A few of them had come and gone—Pyro apparently got reassigned somewhere and was gone overnight, and at some point Demo decided to leave mercenary work altogether to get a real, proper, legally sound job somewhere. Both of them had been replaced.

Their new Sniper wasn’t as polite as—

She was even more of a recluse, although she got along alright with Heavy sometimes. She was also Russian, which probably helped. And Scout felt a little bad about how much he hated her. She couldn’t help what happened. It wasn’t her fault. She was just picking up the baton on this job. Someone had to do it.

Mostly he just ended up avoiding her. And everyone else.

Exactly once he’d tried to take up dating again. Someone had gotten particularly sweet when he was out at a bar, and they’d flirted for a little while, then they’d suggested they both head somewhere else, and that they had a car if he wanted to—

He quietly stammered his way through a refusal. The vague guilt and unease reached a head the second he thought about getting in a car.

He’d needed to sell his car and get a motorcycle instead, at some point. The idea of getting in a vehicle had become an irrational fear, after he’d seen a picture of the wreckage, smelled the acrid smoke on the salvaged belongings.

That was one reason he took a plane home and had all his stuff shipped separately.

That meant that it was a few days of wearing only his old clothes when he got back, waiting for the rest to show up. And those were a little hard to squeeze into, he’d really been a lanky fuck before he became a mercenary.

The only thing he had at home that fit right was the suit, left there hanging in his closet to get eaten by moths.

The suit and the boxes of things were all shoved into the far side of his closet, and they stayed that way. He felt like maybe he wouldn’t ever be ready to look at them again, and in the meantime, they just made him feel guilty.

For the first two months after he got off work, he didn’t really do much. He stayed home, stayed out of trouble. Put his things away, sorted through what he wanted to keep and what he could just get rid of, either selling it or scrapping it if it was just kinda garbage. He tried to catch up with his brothers a little bit, the ones left in Boston still, but he didn’t get very far, feeling weird and disconnected.

After two months, he finally felt bad about Ma constantly tip-toeing around the topic of employment or hobbies (not that he needed to worry about those—he had enough money saved to not worry about much of anything until he was like, eighty), and he started trying to look for work, or maybe just something to keep him busy. For a month or so he looked into becoming a bartender, but the hours were a little weird. He thought about trying to get into doing baseball on some professional level, but he was getting a little old to be going into it for the first time since his late teens and early twenties. He very briefly looked into doing the cartoons for the newspaper—he was pretty good at art by then—before he found out they would require some amount of actual schooling for it.

So he ended up latching onto that, and started heading to the library five or six days a week to spend a few hours there studying to get his GED. His Ma supported him wholeheartedly on it, and got around to telling him, about a month into his new routine, that she was really glad he found something to do, something he wanted, that he’d just seemed so miserable, before, waiting around for something to happen.

Maybe she was right. He was waiting around for something to happen. He got the speech from Miss P—“ten years following your departure from the team, you and anyone nearby you will be kept in the system, and if there’s anyone who tries to bring you harm we’ll catch them before they can, and here’s a phone number to call if anything suspicious happens that you want looked into”. To him, that meant “someone might try and kill you”. So he did stay strapped when he went places, looked over his shoulder, kept an eye on doors and other potential exits.

So when he got back from the library one day and saw a car parked out in front of the house, at least he was prepared.

He thought fast. Kept driving past the house and parked a little ways down the block—he could drive the bike back later, it didn’t matter. He unlocked the door as quietly as he could, pushed it open with his shoulder, pistol drawn and cocked, falling back into old habits maybe a little too easily considering he hadn’t been a mercenary for almost a year and a half.

Voices from the living room—not from the TV, and not Ma on the phone, because he could also hear the TV, and there was a commercial playing that he recognized, one that didn’t involve Ma and a second, much deeper voice.

He steadied his hands, rolled his shoulders, and stepped into the room, leveling his gun directly at the head of the person within.

First he took stock of the fact that Ma was indeed there, sitting on the couch, looking relatively relaxed and entirely unharmed, if surprised to see him there and also with a gun. Then he took stock of the room, saw that there was only one other person here, the one he was pointing a gun at, the one who had slowly raised his hands up to either side of his head. Potentially unarmed, it was hard to tell with his baggy jacket—

Wait a minute.

Scout frowned, squinted, looking over his face a little more closely as realization started creeping into view.

He tried to imagine, for a second. What exactly would seven years do to a guy?

Maybe he’d end up with his hair growing out a lot longer, from close-cut to hanging down around his ears. Maybe with a beard, relatively clean but still a bit messy in some ways. Maybe he’d get new clothes, his eyes would sink a little bit more, would start to crinkle at the corners. More freckles, more spots maybe. Aged, scarred. Maybe he’d be wearing glasses. Maybe, despite all of that, he wouldn’t look all that different at all.

“...’llo, Bilby,” Sniper said quietly, hopefully, voice rough, and maybe he meant to say more, but he didn’t get the chance, because Scout lowered his gun, marched three steps forward, and slapped him clear across the face.

It was a hefty slap. The smack noise was practically ringing, and his hand stung like a bitch, and he’d hit him hard enough to knock his glasses off to clatter across the floor, and his head snapped back at the force of it, and the noise he made was satisfyingly pained.

“Right. Probably deserve that,” he croaked, and maybe he meant to say more, but he didn’t get the chance, because Scout tucked back away his gun, grabbed Sniper by the sides of his head, and kissed him square on the mouth.

It was a hard kiss, hard enough that he got Sniper to do that thing where he made an undignified little squeaky noise of surprise, caught off guard by it. He only melted forward for a second or two before Scout was pulling back away again.

“You fucking piece of shit son of a bitch cunt I’m gonna fucking kill you,” Scout practically snarled.

“Jeremy,” his Ma admonished from the couch.

“He’s right,” Sniper said weakly.

“I’m gonna kill you,” Scout insisted, just as fiercely. “What the fuck happened to you?!”

“There was a—“ Sniper started explaining, but Scout cut him off.

“Car bomb between 2:45 and 2:50 PM twenty minutes away from the nearest city limits,” he listed off, “I know that, but what—seven fucking years, Snipes!”

“I know,” Sniper said, voice flimsy. “First two years were recovery and physical therapy, next four were trying to get legal papers and apply for a visa to get back into the States again.”

“That bad?” Scout asked, still angry but faltering.

“Needed reconstructive surgery on... most of the left side of my body. Lost some teeth,” he said, and tugged his lip back on one side to show him where three teeth, the three behind the canines, were a slightly different color, then dropped his hand again. “Plenty of scars. Might be, er... missing a lot of those freckles you liked. And... voice comes and goes sometimes. But, Australian miracle medicine, I’m much better than I was.”

“You grew your hair out,” Scout noted next, carding his hands up through it.

Sniper laughed. “Lost half my teeth and needed a new coat of paint on the whole left of me, and you’re worried about my hair?” he chided.

“It’s just new, thought you hated it getting long,” Scout shrugged.

“Y’know,” his Ma said, sounding all too amused by the proceedings, approaching with Sniper’s glasses and handing them over to him, “you’re lucky you showed me those pictures all those years ago, Jeremy. Otherwise, strange guy shows up at our door askin’ about your work name and all, I would’a started blasting.”

She nodded meaningfully towards the table beside the couch, and Scout saw that indeed she had a gun there, taken from its place where he kept it stashed by the door as a “just in case”.

“Thanks, Ma,” he said, smiling a little.

“No problem, sweetheart,” she said, and patted him on the arm. She glanced between him and Sniper and scooped up the firearm from the table. “I’ll just go put this away,” she said, and left the two of them alone.

“Would’ve been easier to track you down if you’d given me more to go on than ‘southern Boston’,” Sniper said, eyebrows rising. “And if I didn’t need to be so careful about how I asked.”

“Huh?”

Sniper’s expression fell a little, and he raised his hand to fix his hair where Scout had mussed it up. “Look, you know the rules. Employer keeps an eye out for us for years after we leave. That means if I asked through my usual methods of tracking people down, that’d send up flashing red lights somewhere. So I... needed to take extra precautions.”

“Miss P told me they took care of the guys that tried to kill you,” Scout said, frowning.

“I went off radar for almost two years without official leave,” Sniper murmured. “And it wasn’t on purpose, but I don’t think they’d believe that. They might try and kill me if they find out I’m still alive. I’m a loose end.”

Scout’s heart dropped.

“Only cut it close once,” Sniper said, gaze falling. “But that was enough for Miss Pauling to get in contact with me, to try to talk to me. I... I told her I’m done, I’m out of mercenary work, and... just as a precaution I have to do a few things now. Check in on the regular. I wear this,” he said, pushing his sleeve up to show off a bulky device on his wrist, bigger than a watch. “It’s tracker. Makes sure I’m only in the places I say I’m going. Had to get a visa by myself, get transportation by myself, and it cut my protection time in half so now I’ve had to hire on someone to guard my parents and keep them safe, but now she’ll keep it secret that I’m alive. They’ll stop looking for me in two years, and if by then I’m still playing by the rules, I’m free. Back to normal life.”

“She said it was okay that you be here?” Scout asked. “In the same city as me? She wasn’t worried about that?”

“Told her why I was coming here,” Sniper shrugged.

“And what’d you tell her?” Scout asked softly.

They looked at each other.

“I... didn’t want to assume,” Sniper said quietly, carefully, looking over his face. “That you’d... I, I understand if you’ve moved on. Seven years, declared dead—“

“I didn’t,” Scout said just as quietly.

Sniper gave a breathless little laugh, cupping his face. “Bilby, I told you to,” he tried.

“Well, so-rry,” Scout said next, throat a little tight, hands on his hips, “Mister—Mister Legally Dead. Sorry I didn’t jump into speed dating the second I got the news. What, you—you wanted me to have kids by now?”

“Wouldn’t blame you,” Sniper shrugged, and kissed him, and pulled back away. “But... I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Well I’m glad you’re glad,” Scout mumbled, and kissed him, and pulled back away. “So...?”

Sniper was smiling, wide and unashamed. “So one day at a time,” he said quietly. “We can talk about it more in a bit. First, mind if I use your phone?”

“Why?”

“Meant to call in to check with Pauling in—“ He glanced around to find the clock in the room. “—three minutes or so. And... I ought to tell her I’ve made progress. And... that we’re sorting out details. Might call you over to talk to her too.”

“Yeah, go ahead. Hallway by the kitchen,” Scout directed, and kissed him again, and again, and again, until Sniper urged him down and off before he was late calling in.

He found himself in the kitchen, looking out the window. Ma was unloading the dishwasher and humming. In the hallway, the sound of talking, long pauses, more talking.

“He seems nice,” Ma said quietly, and shot Scout a smile, and Scout smiled too.

“He was—is,” he corrected quickly, flinching a little bit.

“How you feelin’?” Ma asked.

Scout looked down, crossed his arms over himself. “Y’know how in movies there’s that bit people do, all “feels too good to be true” or whatever?”

“Uh huh.”

“Kinda the opposite. It feels... like him being gone wasn’t real. And now stuff is real again.”

“Like you woke up?”

“...Yeah. Yeah, exactly,” Scout confirmed.

“I could tell,” Ma admitted, and stretched to reach the cabinet to put things away once they were good and dry. “Been a zombie since you got back, seems like maybe you’ve been a zombie for a while.”

Scout moved over to help, taking the dishes that belonged in the higher shelves and starting to put those away. “Sheesh, was I seriously that obvious?”

“It was pretty bad.”

“...Is that, like... normal? Or... healthy?” Scout asked carefully.

Ma laughed. “Sweetheart, how should I know?”

“But you know, like, everything.”

Ma pinched him on the cheek at the compliment and he squawked a complaint, and she laughed.

“I don’t know if it’s healthy,” she finally replied. “And... maybe it’s not about whether it’s healthy. Maybe... it’s just one step. And, hey, it worked out, didn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, and smiled. “Yeah, it did.”

“Bilby,” Sniper called, leaning in to look through the door to the kitchen, phone cord visibly all stretched out. “Wants to talk to you.”

Miss Pauling ran through a brief check to make sure he was indeed Scout, then asked a series of questions. Whether he felt safe with being around Sniper on the regular. Whether Sniper would be staying with him on the regular, and the fact that instead of extending security to cover him, she’d need to just go more lax on Scout’s security to make sure Sniper wasn’t found out.

He was fine with that. All of that.

After the phone call, after a few more questions, he dragged Sniper upstairs and flung open the door to his closet, digging through the dusty old boxes with purpose. Then he was pulling out an item and shoving it directly into Sniper’s chest.

Sniper put his hat back on, and Scout couldn’t help but yank him down into another kiss at the wave of nostalgia and familiarity as Sniper nudged his glasses up and looked at him and asked if it was on crooked, the same way he’d said a hundred times before, a hundred years ago.

And, hopefully, he’d say it a billion more times, for a billion more years. Scout would make sure of it.

#sniperscout #speeding bullet #tf2 #team fortress 2 #shut up me #everybody talks #my fanfiction

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tinymixtapes · 6 years

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Feature: 2018: Second Quarter Favorites

TMT’s Musical Innovation Summit, now in its 14th year, is the oldest meeting of its kind in the industry. Like last quarter’s summit, roughly 10 music professionals from TMT gathered in New York to discuss the latest musical breakthroughs and make predictions on which releases will spark future awe-inspiring innovations. To help make the predictions, we interviewed 45 random fans, 30 venture capitalists, and a handful of media who cover the music industry across the country to get their collective thoughts on what’s imminent. That list is then honed by eliminating long-shot candidates, followed by a double-elimination round to get rid of shitty artists. Nominees are thoroughly vetted, and the groups eliminate candidates throughout the process. Today, we are proud to present the results: the BEST 26 releases of the last three months (with a shortlist at the end). We predict that these releases will change music forever. --- SOPHIE OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES [Future Classic] [WATCH · READ] Now’s raw doubt flanges in this memory’s mercury, and we’re back in the basement dark, floor paved with silver marbles. We will shine a light on one, outline the floor with reflecting. I ask are you sure of this? and you say no, never not of any thing. You squeeze your foreign-feeling shoulder, slim quick doubt. Then you hold a marble up to your eye, unclipped cuticles before corneas, a silver pearl. It’s okay. Flashlight on. We gape. There is no neat sequence. No light is set Surface contorts seeing. The shining is bent in coils. There is no straight path, just what we can move into in this whole new world. Roll the flashlight, and it’s a world warping, brilliance refracted, reflections re-membering. The world we built in the dark teaches us how being between might be. Our un-insides, SOPHIE’s sound, teaches us that brilliance doesn’t diminish its self, that light and self and is what we call it. And you say call me Vivian. Becoming who we’re becoming, “no matter where I go, you’ll be here in my heart.” –Frank Falisi --- Playboi Carti Die Lit [Interscope/AWGE] [LISTEN · READ] The arrival of Playboi Carti’s debut album proper, following last year’s crucial self-titled mixtape, could seem like a mere victory lap, an easy cop-out that plays up to the well-established framework of overstuffed rap albums in the streaming age. What a pleasure, then, that Die Lit implodes that logic. The heady balance of mood pieces and out-and-out anthems that characterized Playboi Carti is further refined here, but even without that baggage, Die Lit is a success on its own terms, a flickering visage that compounds Carti’s most enticing impulses — barely-there vocals, Reichian repetition, knotty Pi’erre Bourne beats — with all the best facets of the album form. And if Carti is only incidental on the mic, the tracks left in his wake are anything but. Herein lies a set of real Ohrwürmer, the inner soundtrack to your day, long after the album subsides. The cloud bursts forth; lightning really does strike twice. –Soe Jherwood --- DJ Healer / Prime Minister of Doom Nothing 2 Loose / Mudshadow Propaganda [All Possible Worlds] [LISTEN · LISTEN] On DJ Metatron’s 2 The Sky, the anonymous artist threaded a Jake Gyllenhaal interview through intricate waves of house music that helped give rise to this enigmatic and highly gifted producer. This year, his efforts have come twofold, with a double release under two new monikers that plot the same channels of intricacy but through two very different means. In place of the Donnie Darko reflection that deepens the narrative of 2 The Sky is a 2002 Whitney Houston interview with Diane Sawyer, where the troubled singer discusses her drug problems and an unnerving sense of optimism that inevitably collapsed 10 years later. Essentially, the music that accompanies both of these otherwise unrelated samples is the atmospheric gel that binds them together; an actor speaking about his fascination with a perplexing story line, and a generational icon battling with herself, fighting to overcome the very thing that took her life. That disparity lies at the heart of this joint release, which merges two highly distinctive personalities while linking them through religious and personal overtones. Mudshadow Propaganda is perfect in its projection of minimal techno tracks that build on the traits of our secretive producer’s expired alias, The Prince of Denmark, while Nothing 2 Loose is almost confessional in the sincerity that it lays bare. But where both records celebrate the dexterity and imagination of a single producer, they also paint a picture of human existence at its most conflicted, from the carnal and the primitive to the haunted and the divine. –Birkut --- Grouper Grid of Points [Kranky] [LISTEN · READ] In seven tracks and less than 30 minutes, Liz Harris sought to take us nowhere. So she stranded us anywhere. Giving up on finding anything instructive or stabilizing in the passing moan of a stray vocal, the odd cluster of muted piano keys, or the occasional sharp gust of static, it became clear that the only place where anything “new” could happen was in a place where nothing old and familiar was left. “Where are we?” started to sound more like “Where aren’t we?” It might have been some heavenly shoreline where the water was the same perfect gunmetal color as the sky, but it might just as likely have been the vacant parking lot of some long-since-demolished Disneyland. It didn’t really matter. Anyplace we chose to stand and look from was just as good (or bad) as another. “Might as well call this the center,” we figured. Gotta start somewhere. –Dan Smart --- Seth Graham Gasp [Orange Milk/Noumenal Loom] [LISTEN · READ] A symphony of perversions and memories that ignites every time you rapid-fire through your Instagram stories. Refried beans left over from the camping trip you took to a closed beta somewhere off the coast of Spy Kids 4D. A million splintered renderings of classical text that you half-scrawled onto the back of your hand before you realized that you were actually just passed out on the keyboard again. Gasp is like a raw feed of how music itself operates in 2018; brief bursts of genius materializing right before us, only to be swept away and digested into something unrecognizably new. The entire sum of human history rubbing elbows with that ASMR video you had to rush to minimize before your roommate could ask you what the fuck you were just watching. A guy as unassuming as Orange Milk label head Seth Graham conjuring up untold universes of possibility from his home in Dayton, OH, his bank of MIDIs a window into our gentle, distraught, and hilarious world. –Sam Goldner [pagebreak] Klein cc [Self-Released] [LISTEN · READ] “Oh my god! Who’s actually going to listen to this?” asks Klein, lounging with friends, reflecting on her last EP, Tommy and a still-emerging network of diasporic black art and sound. A year and new EP later, cc sees Klein more comfortable in the discomfort, pushing further with her collages of confrontational intimacy. “You have to squint” as the voices build and spiral, like an endless loop of out-of-office replies, a pitch-bent dawn chorus, singing to each other, but listening too. Klein made us think: about blackness, about opacity, about femininity and Disney princesses, all at once. Feelings too, and a lack of language to convey them; anxiety, elation, mania, but less medical, sometimes an incantation, sometimes an exorcism. In cc, Klein created a space of unique and disarming affect and mood: a deeper, darker stage in the process of “me being my own therapist,” the sound of someone finding a plurality of voices, of listening to yourself. –Joel White --- Beach House 7 [Sub Pop] [WATCH · READ] Attempting to describe what dreams are seems like a task both impossible and pretentious. But, as it floats like a wandering mind, drifting from thought to thought with each track, 7 certainly feels like a dream. Alex Scally plays guitar, but it sounds like an unfamiliar squall from another universe. Victoria Legrand sings, but it comes out in French. Look at the clock, you’ll be unable to tell how much time has passed. You know, dream stuff. For a genre that gets its name from something as complex as the random images our brains send to us while we sleep, “dream pop” music can often be very formulaic. That’s why, seven albums into their career, it’s remarkable that Beach House have found a way to not only completely refresh their sound, but make perhaps their best album yet. Awash in a chaotic darkness that’s been lingering in different forms throughout their entire discography, 7 hurtles towards oblivion: beautiful, glorious, infinite. –Jeremy Klein --- Eartheater Irisiri [PAN] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] I keep losing track of Irisiri; it keeps slipping away from me. This isn’t meant as the insult it might scan as. An elegiac spin on the cyber-cyborg-meat-machine kick that everything relevant is twirling toward, this series of sad little processed ditties and twisted car jams charts a swerve back-and-forth between evasiveness and directness. Its unnerving stuff, giving the impression of solidity while remaining impossible to hold. Flirting with hip-hop and electro-acoustic, bedroom pop and sexed-up sopping wet plastic, it keeps moving out of view, even as I keep returning to it. Listening to the album is like chasing an object out of reach, an object I desire without knowning, a body I want without seeing. Also, C.L.I.T. fucking slaps. –Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli --- THE HIRS COLLECTIVE FRIENDS. LOVERS. FAVORITES. [SRA/Get Better] [LISTEN · READ] For a few decades now, raw musical aggression has been underpinned with a lot of unintelligible vocal sentiment. Just steam on in with howling, power riffs and punishing beats please. But what’s that on the edge of the blast radius, dashing in headlong through the smoke? Clear sentiments that uplift, testify, and provide some sharp kicks in heteronormativity’s floppy old dick? Yes please! Even with its closing remix section, the album’s corroded (and collaborative) essence remains triumphantly tight. The perfect way Lilium Kobayashi’s quick stomping techno pop take on “Murdered by a Woman” flits to “Wake Up Tomorrow” when this album is on repeat further dispels any sort of tacked-on/bonus trax superfluousness. The cultural constant of immediate, frothing punk rage is obviously not going anywhere. It’s essential to have an album, in fuck-this-shit 2018, where that rage is specifically righteous, even with its eternally itinerant self-laceration (i.e., humanity). –Willcoma --- Delroy Edwards Rio Grande [L.A. Club Resource] [LISTEN · READ] Delroy Edwards has made the funk (in its many different strains) the connective tissue of his intrepid, joyful, and often perplexing work. It’s an approach never as explicit as in his latest LP, Rio Grande. That might indeed be its greatest success. In Rio Grande, keeping the raw, hissy, determinedly idiosyncratic credentials that first introduced him to the world, Edwards lets the funk take center stage; sometimes riding grimy techno beats, other times pushing beyond the ridiculous-by-design minimalism of the grooves. The goal is simple: to provide his audience with interesting jams to dance to. Edwards takes pride in the anonymous efficiency of that pretense, as the name of his label L.A. Club Resource indicates. He is happy to be the reliable supplier of a service, the invisible demiurge leading patrons to delirium; slipping in some eccentric turns here and there for the kick of it, to the enjoyment of all but mostly because… why the hell not?. And, let there be no doubt, Rio Grande is the most effective toolkit he has yet assembled in pursuit of that goal. –jrodriguez6 [pagebreak] emamouse X yeongrak mouth mouse maus [Quantum Natives] [LISTEN · READ] Hey, not to bring this up here, but borders, am I right? Why do we even have these invisible lines dividing my side from yours? We can get so much more done without them, not to mention the added benefit of not having to split up families in real life as they cross the imaginary demarcations. Who on earth has the chutzpah to enact stupid shit like that? Not emamouse — no way. No, emamouse had the opposite in mind as she commented from her Tokyo base of ops, “What’s this thing keeping me out of New Zealand? An ocean? Screw that!” And thus, the BORDER between Japan and New Zealand was erased forever — whether through the magic of the internet or the ocean suddenly turning into a jello trampoline is anyone’s guess. But emamouse was no longer separated from NZ sound slinger/cartoon centipede yeongrak, and together, through the magic of Quantum Natives, mouth mouse maus was born, a sticky, gooey, sugary, epilepsy-inducing strobe blast of video-game grit and played-with-too-much pink slime from a plastic egg. Cookcook, in her review, inferred that utopias can emerge from collectivity, highlighting the compatibility of these two artists. I think what she meant was “Fruitopia,” which someone obviously spilled all over the mouth mouse maus backup hard drive. Remember Fruitopia? That was Coca-Cola’s own attempt to eradicate borders, except they were the borders between taste and… OK, between them and your money. –Ryan Masteller --- Félicia Atkinson Coyotes [Geographic North] [LISTEN] I once went to New Mexico but mostly stayed inside. Reasons why. Félicia Atkinson’s Coyotes, inspired by her own trip to New Mexico, maps a journey I may have taken, among other wonders. The crafted narrative and its exploratory form gestures toward an experiential unknown. Her travel log collages echoes, maps, receipts, dried leaves, sand stuck in the crevices of shoes, plaques, diary entries, signposts, mythology, spirituality, and the facts and facets of the land’s native and colonial histories into a total atmosphere, something approaching a direct translation of a lingering impression. It’s so effective and affecting, because the whole is actually a scrap: “a slip of paper, something/tiny & torn off/lifted by the wind” writes poet Christian Hawkey in Citizen Of. Atkinson lineates her memories into similarly moving verses. –Cookcook --- Pusha T Daytona [G.O.O.D. Music] [LISTEN · READ] DAYTONA by Pusha T is hard work. It’s this blurb being written at 5:20 AM on the 7-train to “the office” a day after having led 46 tweens on a non-stop four-day Boston field trip. It’s teaching about heterosexism and female empowerment, leading sixth grade field day, and handling logistics for eighth grade graduation in a single day. It’s your body feeling like a crash-test dummy on a Wednesday, having left in the early, early morning, putting in 12 hours of sweating gallons for money, and arriving home at 8:30 PM. It’s wearing Terminator shades on 125th Street talking Spanish to people you never met. It’s the endurance of confidence while facing every fear you’ve experienced — focused — diving straight into the freezing water. DAYTONA proves Pusha T and Kanye are relentless professionals that continue to transcend literary and sonic aesthetics in space and time. We need role models like these, forever. –C Monster --- DJ Koze Knock Knock [Pampa] [LISTEN · READ] Many publications have referred to Stefan Kozalla as a “trickster” or a “prankster.” While there are freckles of truth on the face of that assessment, much of his affability comes from his most mistaken quality: his earnestness. It’s what makes him such a delightful musicmaker. Being earnest, of course, is the perfect foil to the kind of negativist universalism that plagues the psychedelics/mindfulness landscape in which DJ Koze so often finds himself (and, also, finds himself). Koze’s House is perfect (see: “Pick Up”) and his plunder-pop turns weird into sublime and vice versa (see: the wails incorporated into “Scratch That”), but it’s his unpresuming and gracious approach to influences, samples, and collaborations that push this record into extraordinary territory. It’s not alien; it’s absolutely Earthly, and it reflects so well the modest subject that is Koze. After all, Koze never changes, except in his affections. –E. Fosl --- Elysia Crampton Elysia Crampton [Break World] [WATCH · READ] Elysia Crampton opens in media res, with a nativity. And then it revs up, restlessly — its machinic gears grind like plant medicine visions; water flows and burbles; disharmonic chords take us in unanticipatable directions. And through it all, the oscollo, the feline guardian of people outside gender binaries, oscillates wildly. Elysia Crampton’s maximalist approach takes it beyond the strings and cackles of 2016’s Demon City, yet Golgotha remains always present. Standout track “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora)” was inspired by Ofelia, a Bolivian mariposa (“femme revolutionary”), and it judders roughly, darkly. Crampton’s Aymara and trans identity are her displaced subjects, particularly in light of the gestural movement between her origins in Bolivia and her current home in the US. But this is not any straightforward folk music revival — rather, it’s a deconstruction that reconstructs. The difficulties and contradictions of critical theory, in particular writers such as José Muñoz and his exploration of queer brown-ness, are braided into the work. The first written reference to queers as mariposillas (“little butterflies”) is from Pedro Cieza de León, in the 16th century, in which he compares “sodomites,” subject to punishment by burning at the stake, to moths drawn to the flame. The suffering of our ancestors can’t be recuperated, but through art, we may yet dance grotesquely but triumphantly on the pyre. –Rowan Savage [pagebreak] The Caretaker Everywhere at the end of time - Stage 4 [History Always Favours The Winners] [LISTEN · READ] The late hauntologist Mark Fisher once cruelly noted that the OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word “haunt” as “to provide with a home, house.” And now that we live in a world that has lost the very possibility of loss, we have also lost the one who can lose, cohabiting with oneself in the present’s presence. Ghosts no longer have a home to haunt in any case, and their yearning and lingering voices are consigned to a past that can never pass away. Although it is haunting and horrifying to behold Everywhere at the end of time’s fourth installment pass from memories to their source — what Kirby calls “the post-awareness stage” — perhaps we must be grateful that someone can forget (for (us)). For, the source of memory must remain, even after all memory has been stripped away from it, even though this source can never be aware of itself. Yet, this source is not, strictly speaking, an identity. What it may be I do not know, but The Caretaker allows you to hear, what, behind those eyes, devoid of any recognition of life; we hope, we plead to be someone who remembers us, yet the only bliss, as transient as it is empty, is the wry smile that, for an instant, says, “Do not save me.” –Evan Coral --- Lucrecia Dalt Anticlines [RVNG Intl.] [WATCH · READ] OK, Hoag. You wake up in 1925, in a different place but with the same objects. Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is playing on the victrola. She sings, “Skinless others/ Oils on waters,” and you realize you’re in the same room as the killer. The only other person in the room is dressed exactly like you, and that person’s talking up the other place — the one you believe you are still in — saying, “I think you’d like it there.” Where again? Both places go out of view. Now possibly dreaming, in a time and place before flight, Gein or radio, you wait at a blue-dipped railway platform as trains roll by on their way to Oclupaca and Ortseam. You’re hoping to catch a ride to somewhere similar but elsewhere, more elemental, past the unseen concupiscence between thermosphere and exosphere, out there where you don’t have to wonder, anymore, what the toys do while you’re away. –Rick Weaver --- Tierra Whack Whack World [Self-Released] [STREAM] In the face of incomprehensible excess and stream-gaming nonsense, Tierra Whack — yes, that’s her real name — provides a grotesque yet charming response with the wonderfully weird “Whack World.” Rather than dragging the tempo or chopping the tracklist, the 22-year-old Philly rapper embraces something like a skip-button aesthetic of preview clips and non-member samples, unceremoniously cutting off her songs as soon as they hit the one-minute mark. With 15 songs in just 15 minutes — an absurdity further heightened by its surreal video — traditional payoffs are just beyond reach, forcing us to sit through a goofy, lighthearted romp of youthful innovation and bizarre genre play that includes everything from slow jams and trap bangers to country parodies and kids pop. It’s delightfully ridiculous and sometimes annoying af, but it arrives with undeniable energy and child-like wonder, bursting out confetti-like from a singular, captivating voice who’s on one of this year’s quickest and most unexpected come-ups. Blink and you’ll miss it. That’s the point. –ミスターおしっこ --- GAS Rausch [Kompakt] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] I consumed the hour-long experience of Rausch, blaring through my headphones, as golden hour became twilight and the mosquitoes started biting. Luckily, my timing was great; 2017’s Narkopop, with its penchant for forlorn ruminations, ultimately owed a lot to its namesake: pop music. Now, those hopeful moments of liquid sunlight are far away. Rausch finds GAS staying true to its typically ascetic atmosphere, but any strand of accessible melodicism is replaced by shattering layers of dissonant drone upon drone, Doppler effect-synths, and percussive textures that pierce through it all — shimmering cymbals, palpitating kick-snare rhythms. As each funeral march bleeds into the next, the delirious effects of Rausch take hold. My arms are covered in bites, and temperatures still haven’t dropped below 90. For the superimposed intensity of Rausch, a more fitting listening environment couldn’t be created. –Rounak Maiti --- The Body I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer [Thrill Jockey] [LISTEN · READ] It’s so much to bear. We’re expected to carry more than our own weight. The pain and suffering of our past traumas, the present crises, the future uncertainties. More and more, any attempts to alleviate the pain, to share the burden, are undermined. All we ever wanted, all untenable. They demand purity (in lieu of that, submission by “privilege”), individuality, personalization, subscription. They won’t cry for us. Everything must be on you and you alone. Time will not notice you are nothing. You are already hatred as an abstract to someone else. The pull of the personal must end. The allure of ontology and self-indulgence must be shattered in the face of those who leer lewdly into its mirror and contort on the floor in false ecstasy. But it is a painful burden. “I lower my guilty-looking eyes. I’m afraid of looking people in the eye.” War is necessary and proper, to shatter illusions. But it’s all so much to bear. –Ze Pequeno [pagebreak] serpentwithfeet soil [Tri Angle/Secretly Canadian] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] It’s crazy to think that soil is serpentwithfeet’s debut album. The queer, pagan singer, a former choir boy from Baltimore, emerged in 2016 with blisters, a set of mesmerizing slices of new age R&B delving into faith, superstition, and love. His voice and composition live up to the lofty themes; delicate and meandering, serpent recalled the acrobatic opulence of 90s R&B with brooding, industrial production from The Haxan Cloak. The most visionary artists are those who sound like nothing other than themselves and exhibit a gravitational aura that inspires imitation, lust, and disbelief. soil lurches and waltzes, while Josiah Wise, who prefers to go by “serpent,” remains fully exposed in the mix, employing innovative vocal stacks that whisper, conjure, and croon behind him like a choir of restless spirits. Despite the divine quality to serpent’s voice, which is at times shellacked with layers, often battling against static noise and its own quivering vibrato, the subject matter of soil is immediately relatable and quotidian: the navigation of a shifting dating landscape, the sublime essences of individuals, intimacy and grace in heartbreak, the projection of sorrow onto the world. serpent doesn’t want to be “small sad,” but “big, big sad,” to the point that he’s sure his friends are “tired of him talking.” The domesticity infects us all: How can we properly grieve? How can we redeem ourselves? The occult instrumentation falls away to reveal a queer individual who is merely describing their personal desires. –Ross Devlin --- Sara Davachi Let Night Come On Bells End The Day [Recital] [LISTEN · READ] I walked through the streets barefoot, clothed only in a robe. The bells were ringing, playing their ancient song, letting the world know that the night had begun. My feet were bleeding from the cobblestone streets, which is how they found me in the morning, just outside of town in the woods. I didn’t drink that night. The evening swept me up, and some tribal instinct forced me outside in virtually nothing. My neighbors looked and closed their curtain as I kept walking, holding the hand of the force that was dragging me. I remember parts like my head hurting and my eyes watering. I remember spinning in the center of town underneath a street lamp. I don’t remember why I left town and headed toward the woods. I don’t know why I left my house. I remember being woken up by the police and being embarrassed to face to my neighbors. They took me home and put me in bed, because the medic cleared me at the site. I’ve never spoken of it since, and I still clench up when the night comes on and the bells end the day. –Sam Tornow --- Jenny Hval The Long Sleep EP [Sacred Bones] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] Roping in some of her favorite jazz musicians to explore ideas, Jenny Hval has managed to escape the noose of her recent collaborative concepts and delve within to produce yet another stunning act of imagination. The pure reach and weight of The Long Sleep is extraordinary. Hval moves across emotional ground with certainty and delicacy, capturing the subtlest of feelings. Like a soundtrack to a brilliant short, Hval plays with recurring motifs first presented in the “conventional” “Spells,” but then swerves genre expectations along the way, through the piano-led clap frappe of “The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream” to the blissful title track drone. On “I Want to Tell You Something,” her presence is so powerful, as she attempts to express trance closure through an oblique narrative before realizing simple words are all she needs. Fecund, savage, and irresistible, The Long Sleep demonstrates once again why Hval is so intriguing. –David Nadelle --- Gemini Sisters Gemini Sisters [Psychic Trouble] [LISTEN] How does one describe something so beautiful and uplifting — a beacon of light in a shroud a darkness. I was wallowing deep in the muck and mire, desperate to claw out of it rather than sinking down into it. But that tar pit of sorrow and defeat is thick, and it cares not about your will. But I saw the light and followed it. It led me to two helpful, outstretched hands. Jon Kolodij and Matt Christensen met my palm with a hardy grasp and a hefty pull. And I felt the warmth of Gemini Sisters. The sprawling, uplifting sonic aura of the duo’s debut speaks to energy from whence Kolodij and Christensen are christened: the two having their daughters born on the same day of the same year (and those offspring being Geminis). It shows with the delicacy of their aural attack. It is spiritual, reaching toward the heavens to pluck the constellation and bringing its brightness to our darkest places. Right now, the flesh is weak and the mind wavers. But our essence remains pure and chaste. Thanks to Kolodij and Christensen, I have traded the hastened quicksand for a tether to the sprawling galaxy. –Jspicer --- Christina Vantzou No. 4 [Kranky] [LISTEN · READ] When you’re in a vehicle moving at a slow, constant speed, sometimes you can convince yourself that you aren’t moving at all. No. 4 moves me like that. I know how tired that metaphor is, and if you listen to gentle drones like “At Dawn” and “Remote Polyphony” and think I’m a hack for digging the spatial metaphor up once again to describe slow, deliberate music, I understand. But I feel that uneasy compromise between motion and rest deeply and at every strange, shimmering moment of the album. It’s in the bells of “Percussion in Nonspace,” ringing in a sort of dual presence and absence; in the little arpeggio that creeps up through “Doorway;” in the pitch-affected choral chant that closes out “Sound House.” Whether we interpret track titles as thematic hints or as mere word games, the names of the tracks on No. 4 suggest, along with the music, that Christina Vantzou wants to domesticate and eventually upend and denature space through sound. Usually a device for ordering abstraction, she turns that hackneyed spatial metaphor into one for abstracting order. This record moves at no speed, in no direction, and toward no goal, except maybe to suspend us temporarily in a kind of beauty without dimension, not far from terror. –Will Neibergall --- Kanye West ye [G.O.O.D./Def Jam] [LISTEN · READ] Just because an album sparks cathartic conversations doesn’t mean it’s good, and not all good albums invite candid dinner table discussions concerning their mercurial merits. Kanye, however, has just as big of a reputation for arousing furor as he does for leaving listeners speechless. Meanwhile, critics scramble for thoughtful words that won’t get them blacklisted for being associated with that black magic that has been infiltrating every aspect of daily life since Cain murdered Abel, thus birthing division. Calling ye a divisive document at TMT would be an understatement, and attributing its inclusion here to justifying countless hours of collectively unpacking just over 23 minutes of noise would obscure what ye actually contains: disturbing spoken word admonitions about premeditated murder, breathless bars on prescription drug addiction, ironic fantasies about butts of sex scandals, gorgeous gospel keys and beautiful dark twisted harmonies, celebratory reflections on fame and success, spectral arena rock vibes, and staggering room for growth cleared out by fear and love and loyalty. Regardless of our own individual feelings, ye keeps reminding us that this music shit that gets us through each day often requires plunging into dark places and reemerging with our own beacons of light. Believe it or not, I still love it, and like watching a bright-eyed child grow up in a world this dark, I’m terrified and excited for what’s next. –Jazz Scott --- The Shortlist: King Vision Ultra’s Pain of Mind, Shygirl’s Cruel Practice, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of, Ashley Paul’s Lost In Shadows, James Ferraro’s Four Pieces For Mirai, Larry Wish’s How More Can You Need, Jon Hassell’s Listening To Pictures, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s Red Ants Genesis, Parquet Courts’s Wide Awake!, The Carters’ EVERYTHING IS LOVE, Bernice’s Puff LP, Carla Bozulich’s Quieter, Pinkshinyultrablast’s Miserable Miracles, Duppy Gun Productions’s Miro Tape, DRINKS’s Hippo Lite, Valee’s GOOD Job, You Found Me, and Frog Eyes’ Violet Psalms. http://j.mp/2Kt2EKx

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suzanneshannon · 4 years

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Adding a git commit hash and Azure DevOps Build Number and Build ID to an ASP.NET website

A few months back I moved my CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Development) to Azure DevOps for free. You get 1800 build minutes a month FREE and I'm not even close to using it with three occasionally-updated sites building on it. Earlier this week I wrote about making a cleaner and more intentional azure-pipelines.yml for an ASP.NET Core Web App

I was working/pairing with Damian today because I wanted to get my git commit hashes and build ids embedded into the actual website so I could see exactly what commit is in production.

That's live on hanselminutes.com righ tnow and looks like this

There's a few things here and it's all in my ASP.NET Web App's main layout page called _layout.cshtml. You can look all about ASP.NET Core 101, .NET and C# over at https://dot.net/videos if you'd like. They've lovely videos.

So let's take this footer apart, shall we?

<div class="copyright">© Copyright @DateTime.Now.Year, <a href="http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/t/0/0/scotthanselman/~https://www.hanselman.com">Scott Hanselman</a>. Design by <a href="http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/t/0/0/scotthanselman/~www.8164.org/">@@jzy</a>, Powered by @System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation.FrameworkDescription and deployed from commit <a href="http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/t/0/0/scotthanselman/~https://github.com/shanselman/hanselminutes-core/commit/@appInfo.GitHash">@appInfo.ShortGitHash</a> via build <a href="http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/t/0/0/scotthanselman/~https://dev.azure.com/hanselman/Hanselminutes%20Website/_build/[email protected]&view=results">@appInfo.BuildNumber</a> </div>

First, the obvious floating copyright year. Then a few credits that are hard coded.

Next, a call to @System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation.FrameworkDescription which gives me this string ".NET Core 3.1.2" Note that there was a time for a while where that Property was somewhat goofy, but no longer.

I have two kinds of things I want to store along with my build artifact and output.

I want the the Git commit hash of the code that was deployed.

Then I want to link it back to my source control. Note that my site is a private repo so you'll get a 404

I want the Build Number and the Build ID

This way I can link back to my Azure DevOps site

Adding a Git Commit Hash to your .NET assembly

There's lots of Assembly-level attributes you can add to your .NET assembly. One lovely one is AssemblyInformationalVersion and if you pass in SourceRevisionId on the dotnet build command line, it shows up in there automatically. Here's an example:

[assembly: AssemblyConfiguration("Release")] [assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.0.0.0")] [assembly: AssemblyInformationalVersion("1.0.0+d6b3d432970c9acbc21ecd22c9f5578892385305")] [assembly: AssemblyProduct("hanselminutes.core")] [assembly: AssemblyTitle("hanselminutes.core")] [assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.0.0")]

From this command line:

dotnet build --configuration Release /p:SourceRevisionId=d6b3d432970c9acbc21ecd22c9f5578892385305

But where does that hash come from? Well, Azure Dev Ops includes it in an environment variable so you can make a YAML task like this:

- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2 displayName: 'dotnet build $(buildConfiguration)' inputs: command: 'build' arguments: '-r $(rid) --configuration $(buildConfiguration) /p:SourceRevisionId=$(Build.SourceVersion)'

Sweet. That will put in VERSION+HASH, so we'll pull that out of a utility class Damian made like this (full class will be shown later)

public string GitHash { get { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_gitHash)) { var version = "1.0.0+LOCALBUILD"; // Dummy version for local dev var appAssembly = typeof(AppVersionInfo).Assembly; var infoVerAttr = (AssemblyInformationalVersionAttribute)appAssembly .GetCustomAttributes(typeof(AssemblyInformationalVersionAttribute)).FirstOrDefault(); if (infoVerAttr != null && infoVerAttr.InformationalVersion.Length > 6) { // Hash is embedded in the version after a '+' symbol, e.g. 1.0.0+a34a913742f8845d3da5309b7b17242222d41a21 version = infoVerAttr.InformationalVersion; } _gitHash = version.Substring(version.IndexOf('+') + 1); } return _gitHash; } }

Displaying it is then trivial given the helper class we'll see in a minute. Note that hardcoded paths for my private repo. No need to make things complex.

deployed from commit <a href="http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/t/0/0/scotthanselman/~https://github.com/shanselman/hanselminutes-core/commit/@appInfo.GitHash">@appInfo.ShortGitHash</a>

Getting and Displaying Azure DevOps Build Number and Build ID

This one is a little more complex. We could theoretically tunnel this info into an assembly as well but it's just as easy, if not easier to put it into a text file and make sure it's part of the ContentRootPath (meaning it's just in the root of the website's folder).

To be clear, an option: There are ways to put this info in an Attribute but not without messing around with your csproj using some not-well-documented stuff. I like a clean csproj so I like this. Ideally there'd be another thing like SourceRevisionID to carry this metadata.

You'd need to do something like this, and then pull it out with reflection. Meh.

<ItemGroup> <AssemblyAttribute Include="System.Reflection.AssemblyMetadataAttribute" Condition="$(BuildNumber) != ''" > <_Parameter1>BuildNumber</_Parameter1> <_Parameter2>$(BuildNumber)</_Parameter2> </AssemblyAttribute> <AssemblyAttribute Include="System.Reflection.AssemblyMetadataAttribute" Condition="$(BuildId) != ''" > <_Parameter1>BuildId</_Parameter1> <_Parameter2>$(BuildId)</_Parameter2> </AssemblyAttribute> </ItemGroup>

Those $(BuildNumber) and $(BuildId) dealies are build variables. Again, this csproj messing around is not for me.

Instead, a simple text file, coming along for the ride.

- script: 'echo -e "$(Build.BuildNumber)\n$(Build.BuildId)" > .buildinfo.json' displayName: "Emit build number" workingDirectory: '$(Build.SourcesDirectory)/hanselminutes.core' failOnStderr: true

I'm cheating a little as I gave it the .json extension, only because JSON files are copying and brought along as "Content." If it didn't have an extension I would need to copy it manually, again, with my csproj:

<ItemGroup> <Content Include=".buildinfo"> <CopyToOutputDirectory>Always</CopyToOutputDirectory> </Content> </ItemGroup>

So, to be clear, two build variables inside a little text file. Then make a little helper class from Damian. Again, that file is in ContentRootPath and was zipped up and deployed with our web app.

public class AppVersionInfo { private static readonly string _buildFileName = ".buildinfo.json"; private string _buildFilePath; private string _buildNumber; private string _buildId; private string _gitHash; private string _gitShortHash; public AppVersionInfo(IHostEnvironment hostEnvironment) { _buildFilePath = Path.Combine(hostEnvironment.ContentRootPath, _buildFileName); } public string BuildNumber { get { // Build number format should be yyyyMMdd.# (e.g. 20200308.1) if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_buildNumber)) { if (File.Exists(_buildFilePath)) { var fileContents = File.ReadLines(_buildFilePath).ToList(); // First line is build number, second is build id if (fileContents.Count > 0) { _buildNumber = fileContents[0]; } if (fileContents.Count > 1) { _buildId = fileContents[1]; } } if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_buildNumber)) { _buildNumber = DateTime.UtcNow.ToString("yyyyMMdd") + ".0"; } if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_buildId)) { _buildId = "123456"; } } return _buildNumber; } } public string BuildId { get { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_buildId)) { var _ = BuildNumber; } return _buildId; } } public string GitHash { get { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_gitHash)) { var version = "1.0.0+LOCALBUILD"; // Dummy version for local dev var appAssembly = typeof(AppVersionInfo).Assembly; var infoVerAttr = (AssemblyInformationalVersionAttribute)appAssembly .GetCustomAttributes(typeof(AssemblyInformationalVersionAttribute)).FirstOrDefault(); if (infoVerAttr != null && infoVerAttr.InformationalVersion.Length > 6) { // Hash is embedded in the version after a '+' symbol, e.g. 1.0.0+a34a913742f8845d3da5309b7b17242222d41a21 version = infoVerAttr.InformationalVersion; } _gitHash = version.Substring(version.IndexOf('+') + 1); } return _gitHash; } } public string ShortGitHash { get { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_gitShortHash)) { _gitShortHash = GitHash.Substring(GitHash.Length - 6, 6); } return _gitShortHash; } } }

How do we access this class? Simple! It's a Singleton added in one line in Startup.cs's ConfigureServices():

services.AddSingleton<AppVersionInfo>();

Then injected in one line in our _layout.cshtml!

@inject AppVersionInfo appInfo

Then I can use it and it's easy. I could put an environment tag around it to make it only show up in staging:

<environment include="Staging"> <cache expires-after="@TimeSpan.FromDays(30)"> <div class="copyright">© Copyright @DateTime.Now.Year, <a href="http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/t/0/0/scotthanselman/~https://www.hanselman.com">Scott Hanselman</a>. Design by <a href="http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/t/0/0/scotthanselman/~www.8164.org/">@@jzy</a>, Powered by @System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation.FrameworkDescription and deployed from commit <a href="http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/t/0/0/scotthanselman/~https://github.com/shanselman/hanselminutes-core/commit/@appInfo.GitHash">@appInfo.ShortGitHash</a> via build <a href="http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/t/0/0/scotthanselman/~https://dev.azure.com/hanselman/Hanselminutes%20Website/_build/[email protected]&view=results">@appInfo.BuildNumber</a> </div> </cache> </environment>

I could also wrap it all in a cache tag like this. Worst case for a few days/weeks at the start of a new year the Year is off.

Thoughts on this technique?

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Adding a git commit hash and Azure DevOps Build Number and Build ID to an ASP.NET website published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

0 notes

philipholt · 4 years