Vinnie D.

Picture of me and the staff who operate my Bluesky account

If you see this, repost with your model of positive masculinity.

Presenting Mae Raccoon.

@maegodhavemercy.com

The Time has come to get your fursona. It's been patiently waiting for you all this time.

Unrelated to previous rant, but a thought on the durability of physical media. Optical media is precise, but damn is it delicate. It's a dice roll if they rot it seems. Meanwhile there are 80 year old records that still work. Tape can break, or unspool, but the cassette cases are tough as hell.

Sketch

I've bought more tapes in the last 3 months, than in the last decade, and genuinely enjoying them. They don't actually sound bad if your player doesn't suck.

OK rant over. And yes I realize the irony of saying this on social media. But seriously, fuck streaming, fuck stadium shows, fuck corporate control over human creativity, and fuck anyone who actually thinks they like it that way. Music is ART not product.

Go to a dive bar show with a band playing for beer. Get kicked in the head by a crowd surfer. You don't have to know anyone there. You don't have to be with an in crowd. You don't have to fit a demographic. Just experience some creativity straight from one human being to another. 10/10

So encourage you. Buy a record, make a mix tape, spin up a CD in the year 2025. Better still, go see a live show. Not a big name ticketmaster sellout either. Go to some thrown together DIY show with a band who's never been on stage before ran behind the house of some dude named Scriggy. 9/?

Winding down this rant, an MP3 collection could hypothetically be used this way, but in general it encourages you to just shuffle the whole archive. Streaming, worst of all, detaches you from the art and hands your experience over to a corporation that disrespects both creator and listener. 8/?

Of course CDs also work. Sure they have track skipping, but so do records and tapes if you want to manually move the needle, or have tape player with precise indexing. But in general physical media more encourages you to put it on and listen all the way through. 7/?

Lastly let me say something about other media, so I don't sound like vinyl snob. Tapes, other than being a bit more portable, do the job just as well. Tapes don't sound bad, chances are your player is the problem. Clean the heads, replace the belt of it's old. 6/?

No skipping. No shuffling. No taking it with you in a tiny earbud as background noise. No, you plop that record in a big dedicated single machine, sit down, and experience what was meant to be communicated to you from beginning to end. For the length of this record just have a human moment. 6/?

Compare that to an album that had to be mastered with the medium in mind, with the creative intentions of the musicians in mind, and now putting on a vinyl isn't just about some ideal of analog clarity or collecting, it's about this direct line of artistic communication from creator to audience. 5/?

It's like, "Here you go you fucking livestock, shove your head in the trough and consume, and don't you dare think too hard about it." 4/?

Other times I find myself delving into genres I thought I hated only to find a stand out that I'd have missed in an otherwise vaguely enjoyed, but never truly experienced algorithmic feed. Feed is a good word for it isn't it? 3/?

On the one hand, it's random chance and encountering music and whole genres you'd never consider. Even if you end up hating a record, something really awful is also a very human experience. Like laughing later about a terrible restaurant, or making fun of Nickleback. 2/?

I've been going more analog lately on music. I've always had a small collection of favorite vinyl, but lately I've been searching bargain bins to explore new things I wouldn't have heard otherwise, and I'm enjoying it a hell of a lot more than anything an algorithm can serve me. Rant incoming 1/?

I hate every word of this non sentence.

嬉しくて暴走するうさぎ

I totally failed at capturing a lunar rainbow last night. Kind of a cool effect anyway.

3 hours left. LAST CALL!

Houses in MS typically do not have basements due to the high water table, and shifting clay soil. So probably the attic.

We have a more old fashioned term for this that doesn't require a diagnosis.
EVIL.

PSA

Screenshot of Discord's privacy settings.

Guys, do not use the Discord Checkpoint thing (Discord's attempt at Spotify Wrapped).

It requires enabling them access to scrape your data, and has an alarming amount of private data being used for it.

Make sure you have these disabled.

That is just a helicopter. It's a NEW helicopter at that. You are not getting me in one of those.

All of the companies that make the software I use are increasing their prices, to account for an "investment" in AI.

I'm sat here imagining how my clients would feel if I added 30% to each invoice, because I "really got into gambling".