Happy New Years everybody. I want to touch on few things:
- #GLMusicDiscovery
- Social media usage
- Banging vs Googling
- Things that hurt
#GLMusicDiscovery
People around me grew up. Time shrank. People either stopped sharing music, or, what could be even worse – stopped listening. I started #GLMusicDiscovery ~3-4 years ago? And sparse dedicated musical blog posts here in my small contribution to inject more variety and taste into people’s life.
I did it consistently for several years – each second weekend. No matter if I was hangover, travelling, uncomfortable. I loved the vision I set myself. Music matters. When it plays, world, so cruel at times, can get dimmed out into background. Towards end of 2024 I found myself I was slacking. On several weekends I had not posted and dragged tradition onto Monday.
Vice versa there are days, like this, when I loop a track I just fell in love with. And I prefer honesty over consistency. So from now on, #GLMusicDiscovery will reach you from heart, not schedule.
Dean McPhee – Sky Burial
Hope this will reach you in the mood to play this looped during rest of the read. Or day… (right click -> loop)
Sky Burial is a Tibetan practice to give dead bodies back to nature, allowing prey birds to eat and scatter dead body. That’s the gore part, but tradition reaches at least 12 century and its the ultimate Buddhist way to separate spirit from matter.
I’m yet to explore rest of Dean’s work. But here guitar is very very eloquent.
Social Media Usage
I fulfilled one of my annual resolutions for 2024 – not to scroll social media. TLDR: Ignorance is a bliss.
When Ukrainians captured Kursk I was opening single OSINT account for ~2 weeks to track their progress, other than that, I mostly succeeded. You could witness that based on my drastically diminished social media presence, observations. Arguably I would feel more stupid. Not knowing or having informed was a little foreign. For years I had tracked world, finance fairly closely.
I still have not decided on my informational diet for 2025.
Repulsive Musketeer and Others
For everyone, that still is on Musk’s titter I suggest following the worst of the worst – @MaxBlumenthal. Not for content, obviously. But whenever you see something dubious – and tweet author is followed by Max, you have a lazy bullshit detector.
Seriously – the since Musk acquired the platform, I had observed he had been making drama to spike up engagement and it looked pathetic. Unfollowed weeks after acquisition, perhaps during “titter files”. But what followed with him straight up buying votes and seat in white house, is beyond what I can look at without my blood pressure increasing.
World, and US events make me want to use social media less.
Nostr never caught fire. Blue Sky was for longest time VC-inner circle jerk – invite only platform, comparable to etherium coin pre-allocation. And new hipster “i’m not evil robot anymore” Mark Zuckerberg titter clone? ..I’m not ready for that leap either.
Bing as Primary Search Engine
For past ~2 years I have been using Bing on Chrome as my primary search engine and home (starting) page. After some sanitizing with ublock origin and bings own settings, here’s the look:
At first I disliked that news bar at bottom. I couldn’t care less about cricket and football, that takes hold during weekends, but eventually found it useful. Hovering over links reveals full headline in MSN url.
Search quality is shit everywhere nowadays. That’s the primary reason I wanted to switch google, to escape SEO-tailored LLM-made content. I can’t say I did any serious analytic work to test bings capabilities towards edges, but generally found it comparable and acceptable when in comparison with google.
Besides you get to say “I banged” something out of the internet.
Image search is notably worse. When searching for artists images for #GLMusicDiscovery I quickly learned to Ctrl + L -> images.google.com, enter-> type search query.
In screenshot you can see some search points accumulating. You know how much I made from google since I was a kid?
Well, same from Microsoft for now, but I would not expect them to scam plebs like some VCs. And I peeked at prizes. There are local vendors, so.. looks legit.
Things that Hurt
I typed that before thinking of something, but this whole bing section threw me off, that even Dean can’t get me back. So generally:
- Father, that votes for pro-russian parties;
- Not being worthy (both ends)
- Loosing idealism. Giving up libertarianism to statism. Ecology to Nihilism. (Personal responsibility – never, just world view).
- Loss of investor persona, by not attending to it. Leading others to loss.
- Fear that I’m a shadow of a man I’m supposed to be.
Be better human in 2025. I’ll try too.
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