Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)

Acting ethically in an imperfect world Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somew...

I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe.

@tante.cc has a very thoughtful reply here:

tante.cc/2026/02/20/a...

A few further comments, 🧵>>

My brother-in-law is visiting, and he's showing us a surreal game called “Slay the Princess.“ It uses the Ren'Py (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%27Py) game engine, and this is what immediately came into my head.

Ren'Py & Stim

Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage. PLUS: 10,000 drivers call on Uber to repay stolen wages, a man is arrested at a public hearing about a data center and more.

“…civilians from Oregon to Virginia to California and beyond are pushing their governments to abandon Flock contracts. In some cases, they’re succeeding. Cities like Santa Cruz, CA, and Eugene, OR, have cancelled their contracts with Flock.”

www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/across-the...

I usually see “bone-in” as the antonym to “boneless” in menus, but I think it would be neat if they said “boneful” instead

That's an incredible performance — she looks weightless but also completely rock solid. Very cool!

“Is there a technology the left is excited about?”

Yes. Granular synthesis

This is reminding me that I learned about this band because someone at a dance competition used “What Sound” for a modern dance. I liked the song but somehow never looked into them more. I'll have to check this out!

Also this program looks very cool!

Naturally my brain immediately threw out “romænce pärtner” (from that one Dimension 20 episode)

I love that I immediately knew what you're talking about

I love that another person also thought this sounded just like Elroy Patashnik from “Community”

Man, I just love small animals

Meta's own research found parental supervision doesn't really help curb teens' compulsive social media use | TechCrunch An internal research study at Meta found that parental supervision may not help teens regulate their social media, and teens with trauma are more inclined to overuse social media.

It would be lovely if this information led to restrictions on unhealthy platform design patterns, but I imagine (if anything) it'll lead to restricting what young people get to access instead, which is deeply depressing. Australia already did it, after all.

techcrunch.com/2026/02/17/m...

I guess the translate smashed the Japanese/English together in the top line

“Inside me, there is a dog” (watashi no naka ni inu ga iru)

GitHub - martineausimon/nvim-lilypond-suite: Neovim plugin for writing LilyPond scores, with asynchronous make, midi/mp3 player, fast syntax highlighting, "hyphenation" function, and support for LaTex... Neovim plugin for writing LilyPond scores, with asynchronous make, midi/mp3 player, fast syntax highlighting, "hyphenation" function, and support for LaTex and Texinfo files - martineausi...

There's a nice plugin to write sheet music in Lilypond right from Neovim: github.com/martineausim...

I can get syntax highlighting, error-checking, autocompletion from a dictionary, etc., and it has keybindings to render/open the PDF score.

While I prefer to bring my own text editor, the dedicated Frescobaldi editor is useful to play MIDI output into a virtual bus, and send that to Max to host some VSTs and my MIDI keyboard performance patch.

A desktop screenshot. Neovim is open in Ghostty on the left, with a split window showing two Lilypond text documents. On the right is the beginnings of a PDF score, titled “Forget your name,“ with oboe, clarinet, and MIDI keyboard.

Finally taking the plunge and learning Lilypond! It's kind of like LaTeX for sheet music.

I'd been interested since the Finale debacle, and while Dorico has been nice, I'm finding that in many cases I prefer writing text files to working in a graphical program, so it made sense to give it a go.

I was born in the early 90s, and I'm a fan of Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson (from my parents' collection), as well as liking 80s sounds in general, so that cascading bump definitely applies to me.

They are OBSESSED with the idea that hormonal BC makes women attracted to ‘effeminate’ men and that the younger you go on it, the more it endangers your future prospects as a wife and mother.

My social media algorithms, which have me (correctly) pegged as a white zillennial woman also suggests that this is the direction this stuff is going in.

I constantly come across influencers being used as test balloons, uncritically repeating right-wing fears about the dangers of hormonal BC

In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud — 'The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't,' notes the exper... Who knew listening to a banana sounded so good?

Checkmate, audiophiles:

www.tomshardware.com/speakers/in-...

Especially nice to put them all through the same drive effect and get that nice intermodulation distortion:

I stacked up all the frequencies in the article linked in the quoted thread (bsky.app/profile/reil...), and I always want to show that kind of thing to people who believe in this. It sounds kind of horrible! (at least I assume it does by most people's standards — I actually like it)

I added all the tones together, which I imagine means I get to speedrun enlightenment or something /s

It does actually sound kind of cool (as someone who likes experimental music), but the spiritual/conspiracy stuff is so tiring and obnoxious

Whoa, cool! What model of CD player is this?

Only deeply sick societies spend obscene amounts on chains, cages, walls, and all-seeing cameras as opposed to stuff that fosters beauty, joy, health, people who can think, and a natural world capable of sustaining it all.

Ice planning to acquire $38 billion in warehouses to create detention centers all over the U.S.

There is no easier or more important political position to take than to do everything possible to stop this. It will change our society forever, and Democrats are going along with it.

YouTube video by very tall bart [YTP] Bill Maher is enlightened

There's a YTP by Very Tall Bart (www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR6E...) where he edits Bill Maher to have his entire appearance on a podcast be him saying “both sides. Both sides. Woke. Woke. Woke,” and that's it. He's done.

That's what I hear in my head when I see these kinds of articles.