I had a cat named Buddy, and he would get up to a lot of mischief so we’d often refer to him as “the monster”. Once you start calling your cat “Buddy monster” you’ll find you’re a very short distance from “monster of buddies I’m pulling your strings”.

Here’s Buddy after wrecking his Christmas-themed RV:

Maybe it’s possible that there are many people who are not on the fediverse today for reasons similar to why you weren’t two years ago. Not that much has changed since then (other than, possibly, your own understanding).

When did you begin using the fediverse? I didn’t stop being lazy until I joined diaspora in 2011.

I mean any organization that’s a risk to use my data maliciously is one that can afford buying it, so I actually prefer this to my data being equally easy to access but reddit gets paid for it.

I feel like “Once” is the album where filler tracks started creeping into Nightwish, but “Ghost Love Score” is the Nightwish song. It’s spectacular.

Man I thought Without Face was a band lost to time. I love the song “Weird Places”.

Sandra Nasić of the Guano Apes for her appearance on Apocalyptica’s Path Vol. 2.

This song came to mind for me too. Cult is Apocalyptica’s best album, but that song basically ruined my ability to enjoy it as it was made because putting it on straight-up I’m immediately disappointed by the lack of vocals in track 1.

There was another track from that album that they reworked to add a guest vocalist to, I think track 8, but that one didn’t hit me as an improvement over the original.

After my teenage years it’s been very rare for me to dig into a band deeply enough to learn anything about their members, so the easiest examples are all going to be women doing clean vocals, which is the one time you can (usually) explicitly tell the difference just by listening. Some of my favorite examples are Liv Kristine’s work in Theatre of Tragedy, Tarja-era Nightwish, the first Stolen Babies album, and Sirenia’s first two albums along with all of Tristania’s discography pre-Rubicon.

I have two examples that immediately come to mind outside clean vocals:

Samantha Escarbe is the guitarist for Virgin Black and my understanding is she essentially splits the songwriting load with Rowan London. The Requiem stuff I still need to give more listens, but I think the first two albums are absolutely spectacular music. In “Museum of Iscariot” she does one of my favorite guitar solos I’ve ever heard.

Angela Gossow’s vocals on Arch Enemy’s “Wages of Sin” album are some of the absolute best in metal. I live for that shit. I never really got into anything else Arch Enemy did though.

Now that I think about it, I’ve also spent my whole life with a very vague idea and ultimately only pretending to know what that word means.

At some point about a decade ago I realized I’m much happier just paying the extra $8 every couple months when I go to get a haircut and otherwise just letting it grow out.

I found an explanation here. They’re deliberately not including it in the main f-droid repository for security reasons.

I think it’s extremely unlikely that there’s a reason other than what they’ve stated here, but at the same time this isn’t so important to me that I’m willing to begin making exceptions to my policy against installing any software that doesn’t make it into official f-droid.

Yeah, I wasn’t considering kodi and jellyfin as music players because they serve a broader purpose than that, but I guess they should count. I do have jellyfin set up for movies and shows, but I’ve stuck with strawberry for music because the player interface is a bigger priority for me than having a remote is.

I use strawberry now, which is a clementine derivative. Having my library in one column on the side and just pulling stuff from the library to a variable custom playlist is my preferred player style. Exaile is also like this, and deadbeef too if your library is organized and you add the filebrowser plugin. I use strawberry over those two because it’s the only one I can get from the main arch repositories and I try to minimize AUR usage.

Pragha actually fits this style too and is still in the arch repos, but I don’t understand why because it stopped getting upstream updates years ago and is a buggy mess compared to strawberry with no advantages.

I definitely miss the clementine remote though, being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don’t know any other player that has similar.

I never knew there was a name for this idea! I came up with a silly science fiction idea based on this a few years ago.

All electrical components contain magic smoke that was put into them at the time of manufacture. If that smoke is released, it doesn’t work anymore.

I love this.

Yeah I like a few of these.

edit: I think it’s the ones that are just generally silly with no real attempt at a punchline that appeal to me.

Nobody ever talks about banking fraud, stocks fraud, even when done by the literal president.

They absolutely do talk about those things, maybe almost as much, under full understanding of which discussions will lead to actual action and which won’t.

My first reaction was that there’s no way this tactic makes a significant improvement in sales, but then I remembered prime day is a thing.

Shit I actually thought about commenting that too before looking here and then I thought this is probably a detail everyone does when appropriate and I just never noticed before.

I feel like I do reasonably well with not giving a shit most of the time, it’s a lot easier when you have a support system of people who are cool. With that said, I really do try to hide that I’m almost crying at the end of almost any movie, even objectively terrible ones. Shit still feels embarrassing.